Anyone who know of a book with anti-hero characters who conquer and act like super villains. Looking for books about evil characters winning with good character development and a addicting storyline. No good guys or heroes, just the bad ones that some people hate or enjoy.
I read K.J. Parker's The Engineer Trilogy the first book is Devices and Desires I found the ending disappointing but it may be what you're looking for. Gene Wolfe did a series about a torturer The Urth of the New Sun is one of the books in that series. Read it so long ago that I don't remember if the MC was likable even though his line of work wasn't. Can't think of any others although I'm sure they're out there.
One book I read is World of Warcraft: Arthras, Rise of the Lich King. If you are a fan of Wow, you will love how your favorite boss becomes a villain.
Joe Abercrombie has a series of great books with some flawed and ugly characters that I enjoyed reading Muchly. James Ellroy writes a lot of characters who could be seen as 'bad-guys' but are infact detectives and such, really good stuff if you haven't read any. Tim Willocks novels are amazing, really edgy, dark stuff with characters who arent necessarily 'good guys' but compared to others in his books aren't the 'bad guys' either, haha. Donald Ray Pollock is annother fantastic writer to check out.
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess focuses on a young man who's absolutely awful through and through. He's forced to "reform" against his will, but stays pretty consistently rotten throughout most of the book. The main theme of the book is the question of whether doing moral things makes a person legitimately moral, even if their thoughts and desires are the exact opposite. But this is one of the few books where I'd recommend watching the film adaption before trying to read it, just because it's told in a strange, made-up slang that is pretty hard to get into at first. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is the story of a man who lusts after a very young girl, and is a great example of an unreliable narrator, because he tries to paint himself as a sympathetic and romantic person, in spite of all of the messed-up things that happen throughout the story. Sounds like a very different kind of "bad guy" than you're looking for, but if you were ever interested in writing from the perspective of someone evil, I'd definitely give this one a read. Heads up, though - there's some sexual violence in both of these that can be a bit hard to stomach.
You don't even have to love WoW to read this! I think you can follow it nicely without knowing WoW. Great example though!
