The antihero of Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theatre blinds us with his astonishing misogyny, his exponential misanthropy, his audacious nihilism - and yet he makes us care

Never fully revealed, this malevolent creature is all the more horrific for its shadowy presence

The fact that Nineteen Eighty-Four’s all-seeing despot is not real means that he has has no weaknesses – and cannot be beaten

He may be satirical, but Pynchon’s unsettling, cruel and perverted Nazi is a composite of the fears of the American psyche in 1973

Anthony Trollope’s master manipulator, whose pious style veils monstrous ambition and lust, brings a timeless menace to leafy Barchester, says Peter Kimpton

The bent copper is Welsh’s darkest character, but beneath the sadistic surface, there’s a squirming sense of conflict – and it’s a consequence of his past as much as his talking tapeworm

The seductive rogue who haunts the pages of The Master and Margarita is a very complex kind of Satan

Mervyn Peake’s calculating and ghoulish shape-shifter fascinates readers and drives the plot of the Gormenghast series

From Charles Dickens to Stephen King, fiction offers plenty of troubled children – but Anthony Burgess’s teenage narrator is in a league of his own

In George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, characters come in shades of grey – except for Joffrey, the most hateful 12-year old in literature

Nancy Mitford’s malign social climber in Love in a Cold Climate is rude, greedy, ruthlessly manipulative – and strangely sympathetic, writes Alex Clark

A very stylish sadist, her sustained campaign to ruin her husband is inventively malign but all too believable, writes Moira Redmond

She’s described as a demon, a vampire, a clothed hyena, but is the first Mrs Rochester really the monster she appears to be in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, asks Samantha Ellis

Keren Levy: The only person apart from Voldemort to permanently scar Harry Potter, she is the kitsch face of sadism who, once encountered, can never be forgotten

This sinister Soviet agent may be a torturer and an assassin, but Fleming seems to have been most disturbed by Klebb’s sexuality, says Nicholas Lezard

On the surface she’s all glamour and respectability - but the villain from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is malice in a furlined hood

Nigel Pollitt: He’s great to have around when you want to terrify anyone coming after you, but watch out when he gets hungry