Good Villains Are Hard to Come By. This One’s Great.

Villains, in 21st-century literature, are hard to come by.

Very few novelists write real Bad Guys or build their books around clear struggles between good and evil—and with reason.

Such storylines, when executed poorly, can easily become didactic; a villain can turn into a cartoon.

Yet some of the most satisfying stories out there, the ones that people have adapted and retold for centuries, are tales of good versus evil: Paradise Lost , Le Morte d’Arthur , a decent chunk of the Brothers Grimm.

As recently as the mid-20th century, literary novelists were still writing evil characters: “Big Bads,” we might call them.

Yet the gap between the sinister Cathy in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and the somewhat redeemed version—the girl boss of the brothel, as The New Yorker ’s Alexandra Schwartz recently put it —in Zoe Kazan’s new Netflix adaptation indicates that writers are leery of villains now.

Reading the canon suggests that this might foreclose on a rich vein of drama and meaning.

So does reading the distinctly contemporary work of the Appalachian writer Madeline ffitch. ffitch is a longtime environmental activist, and her 2019 debut novel, Stay and Fight , follows three women raising a child off the grid in eastern Ohio while battling a natural-gas company that becomes their nemesis.

Still, though the company has a slimy functionary, it’s essentially an impersonal version of evil.

But in her newly released follow-up, Avalon, Rise , ffitch gives her villain a face and a voice.

The novel is again set in Appalachian Ohio, in a small town where an internet-famous neo-Nazi has just moved.

Its characters have to struggle against not only the extremist herself, but also her quickly spreading influence, while still dealing with their preexisting troubles, which include isolation, addiction, and one mother’s seeming compulsion to hit her child.

These are serious matters—and yet some of the clearest influences in Avalon, Rise are children’s books.

In fact, Pete Seeger’s Abiyoyo , the tale of a boy and his father who save their village from a giant, seems to be the book’s guiding star.