The Villains Collection

by Paul Geraghty

Where Strasser's villains collection celebrates wickedness from a distance, Culkin and Henningsen let you *be* the troublemakers—two mischief-makers competing to pull off the ultimate prank. You get that same delicious celebration of rule-breaking and chaos, but from the inside, with humor that's genuinely clever rather than just mean-spirited.

by Neil Gaiman

Gaiman creates a villain—the Other Mother—who's genuinely unsettling in ways that go beyond cartoon evil; she's seductive, patient, and wrong in ways that creep under your skin. The illustrated edition pairs perfectly with your love of visual storytelling, and the darkness here has real weight, not just Disney's theatrical menace.

by Diana Wynne Jones

Jones populates her world with characters who are selfish, vain, and morally flexible—including your supposed hero—but she writes them with such affection and complexity that you stop thinking in terms of good and evil. It's what happens when you take the villain-celebration concept and actually make those characters three-dimensional and worth rooting for.

by Natalie Lewis

Here's your surprise pick: a true crime narrative from 1966 that treats real villains—murderers—with the kind of unflinching, almost novelistic attention that makes you understand them without excusing them. It's the literary ancestor of true crime obsession, and it proves that the most compelling 'villains' are the ones you can't quite dismiss as simply evil.

by Patricia Cornwell

Black's faerie court is populated with beautiful, dangerous people who lie, scheme, and betray without hesitation—and she makes you *understand* why they do it, even when it horrifies you. The wickedness here isn't theatrical or distant like Disney's; it's intimate, political, and rooted in a world where being ruthless is sometimes survival.