All novelists are villains. Like despots, we fantasise that thousands of people will pay attention to our lengthy speeches, and often hold the delusion that it will do them good. Having no army, we grip our audience with a trick called literature, though we’re usually fairly confident that people want to listen to us anyway.

The narrator of my book Consent calls himself a practitioner of “people studies”, which means he is a serial stalker, and eventually much worse. He expects to be hated, and dreams of no more than a fair hearing. “I have only tried to live by simple principles with doggedness and honesty,” he says, “and with an open mind.”

The villains on this list are murderers, torturers and rapists (sometimes all three), but when they say they do not feel remorse, we often admire their frankness. Many of these books were condemned as immoral when they first appeared, because they seemed to humanise the evil they explain. We don’t want villains to be human. We want to make them suffer, and compassion gets in the way. Maybe their victims weren’t human either, in their eyes.

1. Alex in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Burgess was the first novelist to obsess me, and like most readers I met him first through Alex and his droogs. The slang is a stylistic miracle, but I can’t say that Alex is a developed character. His high-spirited carnival of rape and violence, then his cruel rehabilitation with aversion therapy, read more like a diagram than a story. (You may notice that the book shares a plot with Mr Nosey.) But why complicate a simple point? Evil people are also just people.

2. Odilo Unverdorben in Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis

Like A Clockwork Orange, the high concept of Time’s Arrow takes a little getting used to. The conscience of a Nazi doctor relives his life backwards, watching as corpses are revived by murderers, grow younger and shrink until they are small enough to climb into their mothers’ wombs. We don’t see the evil Odilo, but have to deduce him as his soul approaches the horrors he committed, consequences first, playing out a fantasy of the Holocaust regretted by its perpetrators, and magically undone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar in The Collector (1965). Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

3. Frederick Clegg in The Collector by John Fowles

This book terrified me before I read it, when a friend suggested that the stalking story of my own nearly finished novel had already be done, very famously, by Fowles. Thankfully, I was reassured when I read The Collector, then terrified for different reasons. Like Miranda, Clegg’s victim, I naively warmed to him at first. Her kidnapping feels more like an excess of earnestness than proper evil. Later, I understood that the two are often the same thing.

4. Meursault in The Outsider by Albert Camus

Camus said that Meursault was an outsider because “he refuses to lie”. He refuses to pretend to care about other people more than he does, perhaps in part because he does not believe they care about him. He kills a man on the beach without thinking about it much. That’s a challenge to us all: human life is only as sacred as it feels, and how sacred do most people feel to you?

5. Humbert Humbert in Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Many people may feel instinctively that Humbert does something worse than killing, which is child sexual abuse, regular and premeditated. Perhaps worse still is the way he talks about it. Humbert implores our sympathy not for Lolita, whom he abuses, but for himself having to live with the desire. That erotic and romantic ache, in Nabokov’s beautiful style, is what I still remember. It takes you to the point where you empathise with this man even when he drugs and rapes a 12-year-old girl.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in the 2000 adaptation of American Psycho. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

6. Patrick Bateman in American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Bateman represents a hated stereotype: the late-80s plutocrat, greedy and indifferent to others. And he does embody those things, but what gets forgotten is the unhappiness. Being Bateman is an endless, looping anxiety nightmare of missed reservations and unreturned videotapes, of the effort to feel superior, just to feel OK. It’s the best book on this list, in my opinion.

Ágota Kristóf's The Notebook awoke in me a cold and cruel passion | Slavoj Žižek Read more

7. The twins in The Notebook by Ágota Kristóf

Narrated in the first-person plural, this Hungarian novel tells the story of twin boys surviving the last years of the second world war and the start of communism. They are self-possessed and intensely sinister, receiving abuse of all kinds as calmly as they visit it on others. By the end, even the unjust world we have seems preferable to the just one they create around them.

8. Unnamed narrator of The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

This fictional confession of an unnamed communist agent begins with a breathtaking account of the fall of Saigon, and ends with him being forced to tell his story of spying on Vietnamese émigrés in the US. It’s striking how fervently the narrator tries to be loyal and consistent, and how this leaves the human consequences as an afterthought. Being too certain that you’re the good guys – that’s where this evil comes from.

9. Harry Flashman in Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser

I suspect that evil in the real world most often takes this form: a person with power, and all the ordinary desires, sacrificing others to serve, or save, themselves. As such, Harry Flashman is the perfect narrator for a revisionist history of the British Empire. This first instalment tells of his adventures in Afghanistan – adventures which, as Flashman merrily admits, show him to be “a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward – and, oh yes, a toady”.

10. Satan in Paradise Lost by John Milton

The daddy of the genre, and evil by definition. I’m pushing it to call Satan a narrator, but he is certainly the hero of the poem, who makes a series of beautiful and reasonable speeches in favour of resistance against the tyranny of God. If Milton really meant to justify the ways of God to men, he might have given himself an easier opponent.

• Leo Benedictus’ Consent (Read Me in the US) is out now in paperback in the UK (Faber).