Jessica Page Morrell

This book did not live up to my expectations. I read several good reviews and hoped that it would give me a solid foundation for creating the bad guys I need in my fiction. But I found the exploration of badness and evil to be shallow and repetitive. It was not much more than I got out of a few chapters in a more general book about character development. About halfway through the book, I started skimming and scanning the bullet lists. The author did present valid points, I just wish they had gone deeper. One point that did make an impression was the idea that the antagonist does not have to be a person. It can be a force or natural law. Another was a good list of types of antagonist that included several non-obvious character types.… (more)