Jen Williams lives in London with her partner and their small ridiculous cat. Having been a fan of grisly fairy tales from a young age, these days Williams writes dark unsettling thrillers with strong female leads, as well as character-driven fantasy novels with plenty of adventure and magic. She has twice won the British Fantasy Award for her Winnowing Flame trilogy, and when she's not writing books she works as a bookseller and a freelance copywriter.
Her new novel is
A Dark and Secret Place.
At CrimeReads Williams tagged four favorite dark and twisted villains of fictional lore, including:
Munshun/The Monday Man of Black House
Black House is a collaboration between two horror giants, Stephen King and Peter Straub – and it’s also a direct sequel to their previous joint project, The Talisman. There is a lot going on in Black House, not least a complex web of connections to King’s multi book epic, The Dark Tower series, but for my purposes I want to highlight the murderer at its heart; a killer who is modelled after a very real monster. The town of French Landing is being terrorized by a child killer dubbed “the Fisherman” – a 
name he’s earned for his similarity to Albert Fish. Fish was an American serial killer from the early years of the 20th century, known for abducting, raping and cannibalizing his young victims. He was convicted and executed for a single murder, but he boasted of many more, claiming he had at least one victim in “every state.” In the world of Black House, we eventually discover that the new “Fisherman” is a man called Charles Burnside, who has been working in league with a demon known as Munshun, or the Monday Man – and it is revealed that this creature has “consensually possessed” many cannibalistic killers over the years, including the repulsive Albert Fish. Being a horror novel, Black House directly addresses the idea that serial killers are, literally, inhuman monsters, and Munshun – with his swollen white head and shark-like teeth – is an especially memorable one. But it’s worth remembering that Albert Fish was a real man, who really did these atrocious acts, a fact that is more frightening than any demon – and it’s also the part that stayed with me when I’d finished the book.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
