Right now I am a little stuck trying to think of villainous acts my villain can do that don’t consist of just killing more people. That’s not very interesting. (Or at least I can’t make it so.) The problem is that he’s a loner type so he doesn’t interact with many people, which means that it is kind of hard to make him subtly menacing in conversation, especially from his POV. He has to do things that are deeply creepy, but he is a guy with a little more purpose to his acts than just making everyone else uncomfortable, so his behaviors have to be reasonably consistent with his purposes. I’m not writing a guy who is evil because he is insane — this guy may have some sociopathic tendencies but he’s not killing people because of them. It’s more like swatting flies or crushing snails.
However, writing all this just gave me an idea for the next scene, which was the point of my internal deliberations, so I can go to that now. I do think I need to reread a couple of books which have very scary villains — Faulkner’s Sanctuary and McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Both are good books, but you do have to be willing to read a lot of stomach-turning violence. Not just gruesome and gory stuff, but uber-threatening violence.
