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Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme started over at The Broke and the Bookish. This week's topic is the top ten Villains that you love to hate. 

This list was much harder for me than I expected.  I think it is because I tend to *enjoy* the villains, and a number of characters that a lot of people would classify as villains, I actually feel quite sorry for.  Nevertheless, I managed to scrape up 10 pretty detestable characters:

10.  Count Olaf from the Lemony Snicket Series of Unfortunate Events books.  He's a pretty two-dimensional baddie who is only interested in getting his hand on the Baudelaire orphans' money.

9.  Mr. Dark/The Illustrated Man from Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.  He's an evil, autumn person with great charm and the keys to a carousel that can make you younger.

8.  Patrick Bateman from American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.  I debated for a while on this one because he's less deeply evil than just grisly.  

7.  Voldemort from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.  Another 2-dimension villain, but what kind of creep tries to kill a toddler?

5.  Moriarty from Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels/stories.  I'm fascinated with him mostly because no one knows he exists (except Sherlock, Watson, and Mycroft).  How can one be the head of a successful criminal empire and be completely incognito?

4.  Count Dracula from Bram Stoker's Dracula.  Even Twilight and other twee renderings of vampires cannot take away the fear of the original entrancing fiend.

3.  Marquise de Merteuil and Valmont from Les Liaisons Dangereuses.  This pair can't seem to stomach the happiness of anyone else.  What makes their actions so detestable is that they treat the rending apart of others' lives as a game.

2.  Iago from Shakespeare's Othello who wantonly causes the destruction of everyone whose life he touches because of his ungovernable jealousy.

1.Milton's Satan from Paradise Lost.  The ultimate bad sport.  Not content to have screwed up his life and those of the angels that followed him, he must continually oppose himself to anything he feels is from God, for "it is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven."