The Psychopath - Imogen Blake

The Psychopath is the villain who walks among us - the charming colleague, the attentive partner, the professional whose interior runs on a different current from everyone around them. These characters cut across every genre, from crime and thriller to horror, psychological thriller, dark fantasy, and science fiction. The mask is the horror.

The Psychopath gives you the tools to write antagonists who genuinely disturb. You'll learn how real-world psychology can inform your villain, how to build masks that hold across hundreds of pages, and how to write dialogue that sounds right until it doesn't.

This book covers the psychopath's relationships with partners, victims, and the witnesses who nearly see them in time. It covers the craft of writing a downfall that comes from the character's own miscalibration rather than the hero's virtue. And it covers the responsibility of writing psychopathy accurately - not as a catch-all for every mental illness the genre has conflated it with.

Whether your psychopath is a serial killer, a manipulative spouse, a corporate predator, or a post-human intelligence, this guide will help you create a villain the reader cannot safely put away.

Writing Wicked Book Six.