A hero (political correctness disclaimer: remember, I use "hero" for males, females, the transgendered, and aliens who reproduce by budding) is only as interesting as the evil in that heroic person's path. John Wayne in most of his movies played the same person -- in the westerns right down to costume, gun-rig, and rifle choice -- honest, professional, reluctant to resort to violence (if you're snickering you either haven't seen many of his films or weren't paying attention; begin your education with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). Only the bad guys changed, and in a few cases were more interesting to watch than Wayne (Valance again, for one, thank you Lee Marvin).

Remember, Villains are trying to do good too. It's just "good" as they define it. It can be in psychotic way: Charles Manson was trying to bring about the Helter Skelter, the race war which he saw as ultimately benefiting mankind once he and the Beatles returned from their underground City of Gold with their 144,000 followers to rule the world. That story must have made the grocery-store garbage his "family" was eating at the time taste better! I'm not sure what OJ Simpson was thinking as he cut up Nicole and Ron Goldmann, but judging from his recent statements it was probably along the lines of "I can't believe your rotten behavior is making me resort to this, you bitch! Don't you ever think about our children?"

But crazed serial killers sort of leave me flat. Except for Thomas Harris's first two Hannibal Lecter books, I find detective stories whirling around them eminently put-downable; I've read enough scenes with women screaming themselves to death as they're carved up in new and interesting patterns, thank you. Give me the Noble Bachelor, the Solitary Cyclist, the Speckled Band, or the Red-Headed League any day.

I find rationalized evil more frightening. Big, systematized, by-the-book evil that churns out horror the way GM does cars. It takes a big institution chugging along to really rack up the body count: the Nazis, Stalin's Communist Party, Mao's Communist Party, the Khmer Rouge Communist Party, the North Korean Communist Party. In warfare it's usually easier for the military to terrorize a civilian population into submission than to destroy the enemy's forces, thus (just in the 20th Century) Nanking, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Depending on who you listen to, Hanoi should be on that list, and a little more bombing would have brought victory, but would-haves in history are always suspect. Pre 20th century you have the dispersal of the Amerinds, Pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition (which nobody expected), the Crusades, the Muslim Conquest, the Mongol Conquest and so on.

A big institution, whether it's the Nazi Party or Khmer Rouge or world-purifying jihad, needs people do the dirty work. The thing that bothers me is how quick people are to start pulling levers and pressing buttons in the system. A set of orders and a half-baked justification ("Jews are vermin") and shazam! you've got a thug, a torturer, a terminator. Doubt me? Study Milgram's experiment. Then sit down and think quietly about the implications for a while. Hopefully you'll come away teaching your children to always Question Authority (other than the parental kind, and if you think you're going to the mall dressed like that, missy, think again. When I was your age only the doctor saw that much skin below my belly-button. You're a student on summer vacation, not a hooker advertising for business.)

I've gotten some criticism for the VE series for not having a villain for my hero to take on. An epic hero needs and epic villain, a Wagnerian battle between the two decides things...yadda yadda yadda. That works in a western, Marshall Duke Wayne vs. Ruthless Cattle Baron, it even works in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (though it shouldn't have...how many Emperors were offed as Rome stood unchanged?) but not for the world I envisioned and the evil that horrifies and at the same time (nauseating thought!) fascinates me.