h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Do you think modern authors have given up writing good old fashioned villains? It's probably the fault of psycholgists and psychiatrists from Freud onwards, but isn't the modern trend to try to understand your villain?

And the way to understand a villain is to write from his point of view(or hers, because I don't see why there shouldn't be villainesses.) Like Sebastian Faulk's Engleby. This is disturbing, because the reader gets to wonder whether he or she could know a murderer, or even be a murderer, given the right circumstances.

If you want your reader to hate, or fear, or even laugh at your villain/villainess, it's best to avoid his/her point of view.

I don't know if you need to write from a murderer's point of view. I've seen several seasons of 'Dexter', and I think they're cheating. (Although I enjoyed it, perversely.)

I think I was about 16 when I started wondering if people around me were capable of the things I read in fiction.

A novel I really enjoyed was 'A Simple Plan'. It was about ordinary people who ended up doing some very bad things. I found it insightful:

http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-a-simple-plan/