Screen of terror ... Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter
Best, worst, most romantic, the search is forever on to find excuses to draw up rankings of books. The latest premise for heated debate (they hope) is Abebooks's call for votes on the scariest characters in literature. Here at the books blog, of course, we pour high-minded scorn on this kind of hedge-trimming approach to literature, but cannot of course stop ourselves from wanting to join the "debate".
Setting aside the ridiculousness of tidying the many aspects of literature into neat piles and orderly arrangements (Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare - in that order) this is a particularly odd way to arrange the library. While film can body forth its frightening characters in alarmingly tangible ways - who didn't flinch at the utter psychopathic conviction of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas - books just don't operate in the same way.
Characters are embedded in the weave of a text in a way they aren't in cinema, and while books can be terrifying, one doesn't really get all jumpy about individual characters after the age of about 10. I know a lot of adults get all sappy about Harry Potter, but really, who has nightmares about Voldemort? He's one of the characters in Abebooks's online poll alongside Tom Ripley, Hannibal Lecter and Moriarty (for the kind of scaredy cat who sleeps with the lights on and loses sleep over episodes of Midsomer Murders).
Ridiculous, but oh so very hard to resist joining in. There's any number of candidates from Dostoyevsky: the very morally flexible Svidrigailov from Crime and Punishment or the Grand Inquisitor from Brothers Karamazov, and for those of us who get alarmed by helpless degeneracy and depravity well, take your pick. Jim Thompson's Killer Inside Me is pretty creepy, but again it's the book that makes me sweat rather than the character.
Anybody want to hold my hand on this one?
