On IMDB, I read that screen testers who watched an early cut of Fatal Attraction hated the ending because the Glenn Close character didn’t die badly enough. They wanted her set on fire, drawn, quartered, and, if I remember the quote correctly, “blown away.” So in the version that was released to theatres, Close’s character’s ending was rewritten, because, as the trivia page for the movie says, “preview audiences felt that [Close’s character] was not brought to justice.” Her come-uppance had to match and even out as much as possible her crimes. The ending had to serve as some restitution for the damages she caused, if only in the viewer’s mind.
That rewritten ending came to mind when I was discussing villains in contemporary romances and romantic suspense novels with some of the members of the Washington Romance Writers this past weekend.
The WRW is a huge chapter – over 200 members – and after the meeting, some members of the Board went out for coffee and then dinner, and like any gathering of romance fans and writers in the genre, finding topics to chat about was way easy. At one point the discussion turned to villains and books the scared the crap out of us. I mentioned Blue Smoke, which to this day I can’t reread unless I know the doors and windows are locked and the dog is awake—and since my dog has cataracts and is about 9000 years old in human years, keeping the old man awake is mostly for my own comfort so I have something to hold onto while I scare the crap out of myself.
When I mentioned Blue Smoke, one of the women said that she didn’t like the book because she didn’t think the villain got served enough of the can of restitution whoop-ass in the end. His crimes were so evil and so awful that there was no making up for them, even in the end when the evil is vanquished and everyone else lives happily ever after. While she was explaining why the villain went too far down the road of no return, it made me wonder if there’s a Too Evil To Bear scale for villains, like there’s a Too Stupid to Live scale for heroines. Heroines who are Too Stupid Too Live, depending on the reader and where the heroine falls on the scale, aren’t likeable, and aren’t characters who keep us reading—I’ve definitely put down books because the heroine was a foolish twatnugget. And I’ve had problems with books where the hero’s actions were irredeemable to the point where I didn’t think he could make amends sufficiently enough to justify his happy ending. We debated that a few years ago in the thread on rape in romance with the hero from Whitney My Love, and it was one of the major reasons I didn’t like Claiming the Courtesan – I didn’t think the hero could redeem himself enough in my eyes for me to believe the happy ending. There were many other people who thought differently, for whom the hero’s actions in the end made up for the beginning.
With the number of serial killers in romantic suspense novels rivaling the number of dukes in historicals, there’s no shortage of vile crime. Have there been villains whose actions are so vile, so completely irredeemable that no matter what happened to the Baddy McBadston, it wasn’t enough to cleanse the palate sufficiently and make room for the fully-developed happy ending?
An axe to the stomach! Gross!
Conceded, Cat 🙂 But how many Runners were there? Like 10? In an age with no telephones? In Romancelandia they’re always fetching them in seconds, like there were an army of Runners just sitting around. It wasn’t exactly like calling the cops now, is all.
I kind of like it when the villain isn’t dispatched at all. But I’m a small minority that way.
First, I would like to preface this with a statement that i have never killed someone or even been in a fight, but …
I frequently find myself resembling Dr. Evil’s son as played bt Seth Green. “Why not shot him, I’v got a gun up in my room, it will be fun” I don’t think killing the evil guy is frequently all that bad, and iit will make everyone’s life better, and just get over yourself for the angst, but I have been told that I am not sympathetic enough frequently
There are also very few cases where I think just killing the villain is not a good idea, cause while punishment is nice, it is even better not to have to deal with the ashat anymore
I’m with Simone on this, villains rarely receive a just punishment in a Regency era historical. Maybe they are allowed to kill themselves if their crimes would bring to many problems to the crown or there is my personal favorite, let’s ship them across the pond and let the poor unknowning souls in the upstart colonies deal with them. As if settling in Boston is punishment enough, and maybe it is from one viewpoint, but it still irks me. It may be historically accurate but it is a cop-out.
I realize it isn’t romance per se, but I would say that a few of La Nora’s fiends in her In Death series don’t receive the punishment they deserve, jeez some of them are some seriously sick puppies, and that is even after Eve/Roarke and company get to them. There are two that come to mind as unsatisfying, both Origin in Death and Innocent in Death I found so disturbing that the endings left me horrified and unfulfilled. SPOILER!!!! But what can you do to a murdering 9 year-old?
I just finished reading Laura Kinsale’s Uncertain Magic and while I loved the the hero, the heroine and the story, I was pissed off that, IMO, the “villain” got off. When I think about everything that this person did…for years…to the hero and how badly it fucked him up…and then to have their punishment be a mystical “imprisonment” in a mental/emotional condition that to me they’d already been living in for decades, I felt the urge to imagine them bitchslapped, stampeded, drawn and quartered, and then burned at the stake to satisfy my bloodlust and allow me to lay the story to rest and move on.
Other than that, I have no further examples.
Something in the comments made me think of the villainous twins (Perry and Kate) from Laurie McBain’s Moonstruck Madness and its sequels. They were nasty pieces who conspired against their cousin/nemesis the hero, the Duke of Camereigh (Lucien). Not only did they hire people to try to kill him more than once, they later tried to kill Lucien and Sabrina aka the heroine.
The plots all failed and they got their original comeuppance in glorious fashion. I think Perry tried to shoot Lucien and ended up shooting his twin. The bullet unhinged Kate’s jaw, marring one half of her face and wrecking her beauty forever. They were banished from England. Perry died years later while they were in exile.
Kate returned to England in a later book and kidnapped Lucien and Sabrina’s eldest daughter. Of course she was rescued, in another book. I forget exactly what happened to Kate, but seem to remember it was another fitting end.
I get annoyed when a villain doesn’t get his comeuppance. In Jo Beverley’s CHRISTMAS ANGEL, the villain robs the heroine and her children of 30,000 pounds and then tries to murder her son, and he is not punished. He’s already spent the money, so they decided to just leave him alone. A quick trip to Australia in chains would have been a more appropriate end. Likewise, in the same author’s FORBIDDEN, the heroine’s loutish brothers treat her abominably, selling her to a sexual sadist, stealing her inheritance when the man finaly dies etc etc and … nothing. I would have given them a bottle of gin laced with laudenum, then stripped them, bound them and handed them over to a navy press gang. A few years of rum, sodomy and the lash would have done them a world of good. Spamword but23. But 23 lashing with the cat-o-nine-tails wouldn’t have made an impression on their thick hides. No, but it would have been fun to watch.
The modern woman has a very strong sense of natural justice. I have never liked the Old Skool romances with rape. I have always felt that if you love someone (or are falling for them) then you don’t hurt them. You just don’t hurt who you care for.
Reading those romances always leaves me feeling dirty because by reading the scene, I feel that you also participate in them…
Ooooh, Severin. I still remember that name to this day. Doesn’t help that a gay friend of mine shares the name. 😛 Who here remembers Graelam from Fire Song? I read that book twice (who knows why) and wanted to set in on fire each time. That was one nasty mofo of a hero-rapist. Huge, hulking brute raping the teeny-tiny heroine. REPEATEDLY. Seriously. >:| The only “nice” thing he did was use some sort of lube. Seems like she passed out at least once! May he rot.
I was reading romances by 14 (barely 2000), but mostly from a small town library and small town used bookstore. So you can imagine how many rape-romances I ingested at about 1-3 books/day (go speed-reading; thanks for screwing with my psyche!). Just about every Catherine Coulter, Jude Devereaux, Johanna Lindsey, Julie Garwood, Judith McNaught and Kathleen E. Woodiwiss book printed by then. *facepalms* Heroes otherwise known as fuckheads. Though I do give props to the authors who eventually began writing pretty cool heroes (I think I recall Johanna Lindsey doing it in the 2nd or 3rd sci-fi romance she wrote – the first hardback I ever bought off the shelf). Julie Garwood maybe shouldn’t be included in the group. Can’t recall. 😛
As for villains…I gotta diverge from the group here. I absolutely adore it when well thought-out villains get away, or they become far too complicated for you to feel comfortable torturing and killing them off at the end. Kinda like The Joker from The Dark Knight. Totally stole the show, beloved by most. Offhand, I can’t think of any villains in romances to fit the bill, but the moral ambiguity I love so much can be found in Kit Whitfield’s Benighted and maybe in Faith Hunter’s series to a degree.
Stupid villains, however, should die every single time.
Interesting topic, personally I think there should be a law made that requires sexually abusive characters to die a painful death at least at the end of the book.
Lector is a great villain because he follows a stringent moral codex, much like Dexter does, that has him preferrably kill people that deserve to to die. Which throws up the question, can we really justly put him in the villain section only because he’s killing a few people?
The only villain for which I, for a moment, hoped for a redemption was Dollarhyde in Harris’s “Red Dragon” when he almost falls in love and for the first time starts to be a human being.
That had something touching, pityful, but then again Dollarhyde is a villain that didn’t have full control over his actions he is after all driven by madness.
I guess ‘good’ villains are more difficult to write than heroes, a hero/heroine has only to be good, but a villain must be evil, vile, we must be able to hate him with a fervor and not have a bad conscience over it, and yet not so much as to have us turn away from the book completly because we can’t stomach witnessing his deprived acts anymore.
I love the Fate Takes a Hand and punishes the villains type of endings. Mary Stewart in Touch Not the Cat ***SPOILER*** has the evil twin cousins punished by a flood they unleashed. One is injured so badly that the hero is certain he won’t survive and the other is too incompetent to manage without his brother. Absolves the H/H from karma, punishes the guilty, and no boring trial scenes to imagine.
This is EXACTLY what I thought of when I read this post. There have been several of the “in Death” books that the ending just pissed me off. I’m from the school of “an eye for an eye.” Those psychotic killers deserve to be tortured, mutilated and much more before flat out killing them. They don’t deserve an easy death after what they’ve done in some of those books. Committing suicide or a quick bullet to the head isn’t enough. LOL
And I don’t understand these TV shows when the good guy/girl corner the villain yelling, “Drop the weapon or I’ll shot.” Dangit! Just SHOOT! You know they’re either gonna shoot you or their partner will come up behind you and put a gun to your head. Call me evil, but I”m shooting first. I might not kill them, but I’m gonna disarm them. No warning.
Great topic! For some reason I can’t come up with a villian that didn’t get the just desserts, and shoud not be commenting, but the Too Stupid To Live mention sparked my memory.
The last book I tossed across the room was Darkfever by Karen Marie Moning. The main female, MacKayla, was so damn annoying and such a twatnugget. *ZOMG! I love that word* She was so annoyingly whiney, I don’t think I have every been so annoyed by a character before. Not to mention wimpy, irritating and STUPID. Really too stupid to live and should have been put out of her misery as quickly as possible.
This weekend, my husband and I watched the movie “Taken”. For those not in the know, it stars Liam Neeson as a former CIA agent whose daughter is kidnapped by human traffickers. Many scenes in the show depict the horror that such kidnap victims are subject to – the forced drug addiction and prostitution and even death. It made me sick. And one by one, Liam picked the evil bastards responsible for his daughter’s abduction off. However, with each gun shot that got rid of a baddie, I said to my husband that it wasn’t enough. I wanted these guys to suffer a lot of pain and anguish before their eventual deaths because of the evil that they perpetrated. I’m not a violent person, and the idea of torture horrifies me. But I wanted these villains to beg for death. There is no level of hell too horrible for people who would do such a thing.