During this season of witches, black cats, ghosts and goblins, displays of Halloween evil throw dark shadows far and wide as all kinds of wicked characters dominate movies and television shows, lit up front yard displays, party decorations, and in the enthusiastic trick-or- treat costumes lining sidewalks and front porches on every corner. Then, once the season is over, these naughty villains disappear from sight – until they make their appearance again next year.

Unlike those pretend evil bad-doers, the villain antagonists in our fictional stories do not disappear from the books lining library and book- store shelves the way the seasonal ones depart on the first of November each year; instead they continue to wreak havoc on the protagonist- heroes living beside them all year long.  Also, unlike the costumed Halloween celebrators, these antagonists are not so easy to spot on the surface.  Their evil is often hidden or disguised deep enough to make it impossible to recognize at first glance.

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, the protagonist – well respected Dr. Edward Hyde creates a serum to justify the immoral feelings and thoughts festering within him that he has resisted thus far, until those temptations grow too strong to fight any longer.  After he creates and empowers  the villainous Mr. Henry Hyde – the evil part of himself, he realizes too late, after having indulged in heinous behavior,  that the only way to fight evil is first to correctly identify it as such, then to resist its temptation, and finally to destroy it, without ever giving it even a second of life.

Similarly, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, readers are at first led to believe the story’s evil antagonist villain is the monster Dr.  Victor Frankenstein creates, but ultimately after Dr. Victor creates, then rejects and ultimately abandons the creature he brought to life, we learn that it is Dr. Victor Frankenstein himself who is the real monster in the story and to some degree so is the prejudiced and shallow society who shuns the creature because of his looks alone, without ever having given him a chance.

Other fictional antagonist villains include such well known actors as Lee Harper’s Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird who accuses Tom Robinson of rape, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatbsy, with his corrupt old money and selfishness that ultimately leads Gatsby to his downfall, and William Golding’s Jack Merridew  in Lord of the Flies with his hunger for power and subsequent descent into savagery, to name just a few.  They may not look like evil monsters on the outside but they are wicked all the same. Just like in our real world.

In Marc Chacksfield’s Shortlist of the 41 Greatest Villains of literature, he describes the best villains as he sees it:  To have a hero, you need a villain. And in the annals of literary history, there have been some downright scoundrels, to put it mildly …….No deed is too dark, no action too despicable for this list of utter reprobates……You should feel very very glad that these dastardly characters are confined to the pages of the books that contain them.  And yet, we have to wonder if Chacksfield is right; are these villainous characters REALLY confined to the pages of the books we read or are they breathing, walking and living amongst us out here in our real world? We have certainly witnessed a good amount of evil events acted out by real life villains here in our real world. One only needs to turn on the news or read someone’s social medial pages to be drawn into real life scenes of evil that mirror what we read in fiction.

In the July/August 2025 How to Write amid chaos, author Tiffany Yates Martin explains how the villains in fictional narratives help us in our real life stories ; We see ourselves and the people around us in story- it offers insight about the human condition, alternative perspectives and universal longings and struggles.  In the pages of a story, we might understand what motivates even those we disagree with and see them not as a faceless other but as a whole people-complex, flawed, and wounded, just as we all are. And the shared appreciation of story can surmount even the most powerful differences, offering common ground to bring people together.

Human beings have always been fascinated by or drawn to some form of evil going back to the Garden of Eden when evil made its first appearance. Whether it lies in the bite of an apple, or at the side of a road in a horrific automobile wreckage, or on the big screen in a motion picture, or within the character of someone we know or love, its dark magnetic attraction draws us to it like one of those souvenir magnets sticking to a refrigerator. Is it curiosity, entertainment, or a need to fill or question a void within us that draws us toward the darkness?  Or is it our way of telling ourselves we have ONLY goodness and kindness inside, that we are incapable of harboring dark thoughts or engaging in any level of villainous behaviors. By recognizing and classifying evil elsewhere perhaps we can assure ourselves we are immune from it like taking a vaccine to ward off disease, that we are protected from its influence.

In Moriah Richard’s March/April 2025 Writers Digest interview with award winning author Stephen Graham Jones, she asks Jones if people ask him why he writes so much horror when the real world is horrifying enough, to which he responds; … I think what gazing at the flames of the fire can do is when we engage horror media, whatever kind, we’re seeing characters struggling through a dark, violent , terrible, scary tunnel, the same way we are.  The difference is those characters on screen; on the page… they get to the end. And that gives us here in the real world, in our own dark tunnels, hope that there is going to be an end to this horror story.

 Robert Louis Stevenson said it like this; In each of us, two natures are at war-the good and the evil.  All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose-what we want most to be we are.  His Jeckyll/Hyde idea resonates in the old native folklore originated by the Cherokee people;  A elderly native American once told the story to his grandson of how there exists two wolves inside each of us. One of the wolves is mean and evil, he told the child, while the other wolf is good and kind. The evil wolf fights the good wolf continuously. When the grandson asked him which wolf wins the battle, the elderly native American answers “ The one we feed.”

 Saint Francis of Assisi once said; All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.  Each one of us has the capability to be that candle. Despite the need for villains to exist to balance out a narrative or add excitement and suspense in our fiction, it is the heroes facing evil who oppose it, resist it or outright defeat it who inspire us to grow, to find our purpose, to carry hope, to help others and to believe that anything is possible if you fight hard enough for it.

 In the good versus evil battle between heroes and villains, we witness the infinite possibility and incredible power the single candle has to bring light to a world overflowing with darkness and despair.  And in feeding only the good wolf, we can starve the evil one or at least give him the opportunity to change sides if he wants to survive.