Five novels featuring monstrous men

Heather Parry is a Glasgow-based writer and editor, originally from South Yorkshire. Her debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. She is also the author of a short story collection, This Is My Body, Given For You, and the non-fiction book, Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism. Parry lives in Glasgow with her partner and their cats, Ernesto and Fidel. Her second novel, Carrion Crow, will be published in 2026.

At CrimeReads the author tagged five "books that continue to inspire me for their bold, unflinching ways of looking at the monstrous man, both the real and fictionalized versions of him." One title on the list:

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: the Story of a Murderer

The 1980s might have been the decade that Hannibal Lecter was introduced to the world by Thomas Harris, first in Red Dragon and then in The Silence of the Lambs, but on the other side of the Atlantic, German writer Patrick Süskind was dreaming up another killer with sharp senses: Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan born in eighteenth-century France, whose preternatural sense of smell leads him first to the business of perfume and then onto somewhere darker.

Just as Lecter spends his time considering the perfect meal, Grenouille is obsessed with harnessing the perfect smell, one that he first smelled on the skin of a young woman, with which he has become dangerously preoccupied. His attempts to distill that essence into a liquid push him down a path of multiple murders as his singular goal overwhelms his respect for life, but despite being caught, he performs a trick at the end of the book which reveals the latent desires within the population in general, showing that he is not alone in having a streak of pure evil in him, bound up in sensory pleasure.

This is a novel that luxuriates in both filth and opulence, and says more about the nature of lust than we would like to admit.

Read about another novel on the list.

Perfume is among Liz Nugent's top ten first lines in fiction, Liz Boulter's ten best novels about France, Glenn Skwerer's top ten real-life monsters in fiction, four books that changed Meg Keneally, four books that changed Katrina Lawrence, Karen Runge's five (damn-near) perfect (dark) novels, and Lara Feigel's top ten smelly books.

--Marshal Zeringue