Novels where the villains win!

[theweaselking]

I did "movies where the villains win" a while back. This time, it's novels.

Rule #1: No short stories. The purpose of the short story, as a genre, is to let the villains win in a setting that requires minimal reader involvement: Get the reader invested enough to kick them in the gut, then kick them. Fuck 'em, they try too hard. No short stories, NOVELS.

Rule #2: Bonus points are offered for anything longer than a Novella.

Rule #3: Most old novels are all basically novellas, which is kind of sad. So they count for less.

That being said: Novels where the villains win, outright.

First, the obvious, the barely-beyond-novella classics of "shit is fucked up and wrong":
1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Time Machine.

Second, the more modern:
Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" - even if you take Card's interpretation that Ender isn't the villain, the bad guys win everything they wanted. Given that Ender really *is* the villain, nobody wins that one.
Charlie Stross, "The Merchant Princes" - a deconstruction of the standard "real-world princess discovers fantasy land where she brings civiilisation to the savages" trope, shit goes horribly wrong. The phrase "President Ashcroft" is involved.
"Red Dwarf" - no, really, if you can read the end of this without shuddering, something is wrong.
EDIT: Bret Easton Ellis, "American Psycho"
Chuck Palahniuk, "Fight Club".

Third, the fakeouts, where the "villain" who wins is actually the hero all along:
I Am Legend.
EDIT: Atlas Shrugged.


What am I missing? What are the other novels where the villains win?

Comments

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. It's an old (and rather short) one, and the bad guys tend to be abstract forces of societal degeneration and unthinking cruelty, and they're very impersonal, but I think it counts.

Stand On Zanzibar by John Brunner. I'll just go over here and cry now.

Days by James Lovegrove, almost--the bad guys win, I think, but the protagonists get out from under. So.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The villains in Days are archetypes, occupying mythic roles. They can't NOT act the way they do, and they're also not characters so much as they are placeholders for gods.

They're not villains, per se, any more than forces of nature or Greek gods are villains.

[ashbet]

Guillermo del Toro/Chuck Hogan, "The Strain" trilogy -- not only do the villains kick everyone's asses for the majority of the three books, the only way to "win" against them is for the hero to self-destruct by setting off a nuke in a world which is already in a nuclear winter. The chief villain finally dies, but the world is fu-u-u-u-ucked.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Stephen King's "Tommyknockers", IIRC, ends on a downbeat note. However, since it is a full-length King book, it kind of means that around halfway thru you've stopped giving shit about people and just want to reach the end so you don't need to read it ever again... (I like his short stories and rigorously edited novels better; his grand vision stays together better) Hmm. I s'pose "Cujo" counts too; sure, you may have killed the rabid dog, but you also lost the kid, even if the "bad guy" is more like destructive force of nature that wants nothing beyond perpetuating rabies.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

In Tommyknockers, Gard the only person immune to Tommyknocker control launches most of them into space and kills off all the rest. He dies, but the Tommyknockers lose. Cujo: a child dies but so does the dog?

But I'll give you Salem's Lot, for King.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Depending on your definition of villain, The Genocides by Disch.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Never read it. Summary/link to summary?

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

"Villains By Neccessity" by Eve Forward. Epic fantasy world where Good Has Triumphed. Unfortunately it means sunshine and flowers and eternal spring, so the druids are out to bring back evil before nature is completely knocked for a loop. Main character is a thief freaked out that all his fellow thieves have gotten brainwashed and taken up basket weaving. Kinda deliberate, though, and the bad guys are the good guys, so the people you're rooting for still win.

Much of Lovecraft's work probably counts too, as the narrator is dying and scribbling their surprisingly lengthy final words, getting dragged off in a metal canister, or joining the Deep Ones.

Greg Bear's "Forge of God" -- Earth is destroyed, some humans escape to Mars, but generally the aliens pretty well kicked our ass.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Thought about Lovecraft, but in The Mountains of Madness I wouldn't say the bad guys win, and he mostly did short stories...

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Grunts! ?

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Peter Watts: Blindsight.

Depending how far back you're willing to go, and what formats are permissible, any of the versions of Faust. (Does Goethe's epic poem count? Does the script of Marlowe's play?)

[opaqueplanet.livejournal.com]

I always considered the Greeks to be the villains of the Trojan War (but perhaps I'm biased, as my name is Cassandra rather than Clytemnestra). They are winning by the end of the Illiad, and go on to win the war and throw babes from the city walls and rape women in temples.

Whether or not an epic poem counts, whether Mycenaeans are considered to be bad guys, and whether they can be said to have officially won by the end of the Illiad (which ends not with the actual end of the war, but with the return of Hector's body), is all up for question.

[lurkerwithout.livejournal.com]

For nastiest Bad Guy Wins, I'd say Joe Abercrombie's first trilogy "First Law". "Judgement of Kings" was fuck tons depressing...

[illian.livejournal.com]

Seconded. Excellent writer but the ending pissed me off enough to throw the book across the room.

[lurkerwithout.livejournal.com]

Also if you allow books where the "hero" is a crook then lots of noir and pulp books probably. Starting with Richard Stark/Donald Westlake's "Parker" series...

[torrain.livejournal.com]

I don't think that the protagonist breaking the law is enough to have them inherently qualify as being the bad guy of the narrative.

I mean, The Talented Mr. Ripley totally counts. But even if it were novel-length, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar does not, not even with the protagonist being a thief.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Well, "No Country for Old Men" and "Watchmen" were novels before they were films, so that counts. I just read NCfOM... the book is even more harrowing than the film. Of course, i'm not sure if saying that the villain wins outright would be accurate for either, but they do get away with it.

Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series has an assassin as the protagonist, so it could be argued that he gets away with murder all the damn time, but he's definitely not a villain. However, his novel "Agyar" might count. Possibly "To Reign in Hell".

Hmm. I also submit "Johnny Got His Gun" for consideration.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Hmh. Does graphic novel count as novel?

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

Oh! "Haunting of Hill House!"

And arguably "We Have Always Lived In The Castle," as you find out that one of the protags was indeed the murderer all along, and the other one knew it.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

I second both.

[auntiesiannan.livejournal.com]

Twilight.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I don't think he means the reader invariably loses.

[dreamshade.livejournal.com]

I've just started reading through Discworld and am not through much of the series yet, but I seem to remember hearing someone on a forum once talk about a book where the heroes totally fail.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

That may be a reference to Jingo, where Vimes at the end is carrying a Disorganiser from an alternate trouser-leg of time, and gets to hear what would have happened if he had made a certain decision differently.

("Ovatyl orrc! Guvatf gb qb gbqnl: Qvr.")

[lordbleys.livejournal.com]

A Night in the Lonesome October, Roger Zelazny

[rev-ursa.livejournal.com]

That's arguable.

[gryphart.livejournal.com]

I'd say both of the K. J. Parker novels I've read - Folding Knife is definitely a "hero loses" novel, and The Company is at the very least a "no one wins" ending.

[pocketofheather.livejournal.com]

Hello Kitty Must Die by Angela S. Choi. The main villain loses, but only because he gets taken out by the secondary villain, who at the end is triumphantly bragging about how she's going to go on killing people any time, any place she feels like it.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

A Game of Thrones. Although no character is definitively good or evil, I think it is fair to say that Ned Stark is portrayed as the "good guy" in that book.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

I will grant no viewpoint character is definitively evil, but IMHO Gregor Clegane is. (Admittedly, this is a bit of a pet point for me, since I have had to deal with people who read the books saying "oh, he never did anything really bad," or "but he grew up that way because everyone made fun of him for being so big and strong when he was a kid!")

(I wish I was joking about that last.)

[calankh.livejournal.com]

On the Beach, by Nevil Shute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_%28novel%29

Though not sure it counts as the 'bad guys' aren't every actually named or dealt with. Everyone's dead at the end anyway.

[whisperkit.livejournal.com]

Arguably all of the Warhammer 40,000 Novels where the protagonists are members of the Imperium of Man. Often they win against something worse, but they are still Fascist zealots who wouldn't look out of place in the SS. The mildest of them (Ciaphus Cain springs to mind as one of the better people in the faction, and that's a pretty big warning sign since he's a Flashman homage) are at best the "nice-ish guy trying to get by in an ugly system" trope, and even they have the inherent frothing xenophobia (Cain himself inwardly professes disdain at the idea that anyone would think sapient alien races had minds). The most popular/frequent novels tend to go full-on in the other direction however, having Glorious Spartan Ubermensch vs The Braying Foreign Hordes.

Bringing this awkward fact up on any wargaming forum is tantamount to blasphemy, mind. :|

Others:
John Sladek - Tik-Tok
Philip K. Dick - various.. "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said" is the one that immediately springs to mind.

Are you counting comics/manga/graphic novels? I'm guessing not, but worth checking.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Ciaphus Cain springs to mind as one of the better people in the faction, and that's a pretty big warning sign since he's a Flashman homage

Marketed as such, but Cain is a significantly better person than Flashman. While Cain might shirk battle to save his own skin, I can't remember him ever deliberately screwing somebody over for his own gain. Flashman, OTOH, is a cold-hearted bastard (and rapist).

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

"Hannibal", although it doesn't fit the mold neatly: villain defeats two other villains while seducing the heroine.

Rey mentions that from an Australian perspective, "Watership Down" fits since the rabbits win. She also invokes most of Katherine Kurtz' Deryni series.

John Wyndham's "Web" ends with implied victory for the spiders, although I'm not sure whether it makes novel-length.

"A Clockwork Orange"? No real heroes in there, though.

"Mother Night" kinda-sorta. Depending on how you take it.

[opaqueplanet.livejournal.com]

Re: Hannibal
I considered Dr. Lecter to be the protagonist (or co-protagonist, perhaps), even if he's a bad guy. He's certainly the one we're rooting for. Now if Mason Verger had succeeded in his exploits, we would have a "villain wins" scenario. Dude literally drank the tears of children.

[awesomelies.livejournal.com]

China Miéville's Iron Council, though he carefully sets that up so the villains win but the good guys don't exactly lose.

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

Which is sort of the opposite of Perdido, where the villains mostly lose, but the good guys don't exactly win.

[lawmaking.livejournal.com]

I'd add "We" by Zamyatin. A lot like 1984, though published almost 30 years earlier.

[swwoodsy.livejournal.com]

A Simple Plan by Scott Smith. It may qualify as novella. It was bleak. NObody wins. They made a movie of it, but I refused to see it. And I hear they had to soften the ending of the book.

[lurkerwithout.livejournal.com]

Its a pretty bleak movie and very much has a No One Wins ending. I'd hate to think what a harder ending for it might be. I mean it would have to verge into "Very Bad Things" territory...

[atesh42.livejournal.com]

If you consider the governments to be the real villains, then Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Though it probably does fall under novella.

[atesh42.livejournal.com]

Also, a lot of Jim Thompson novels. The Getaway comes to mind strongly.