QUIZ:10 SUPER BAD GUYS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Test your knowledge of the Super Bad Guys. From Wall Street to the Wild West; from mainstream to transgressive . . . here are 10 hombres you would not want to run into, ever. Tag ’em, and you’re in the running to receive a 30-euro (£20 / $30) gift certificate to spend at Amazon; in case of a tie, a name will be drawn. Deadline: Sept. 15, 2010

This quiz is now finished - to see the answers click here.

Name the character:

1. He uses a captive bolt pistol (also variously known as a cattle gun, stunbolt gun, or stunner) to kill many of his victims (and to destroy several cylinder locks in order to open doors), as well as a silenced shotgun. He is one very mean man.

2. His device for torturing women involved plastic tubing and rats. And the Chinese Laundromat paid no attention to the bloody sheets.

3. A violent sociopath - part of the YLT (Young Leith Team) football hooligan gang – he terrorizes his friends into going along with whatever he says, assaulting and brutalizing anyone who angers him; he’s the only one of his group who doesn’t do H, but he’s addicted to alcohol, amphetamines, and violence.

4. He was bad from birth and not even his mother could love him. In a school massacre, he goes after students with a bow and arrows.

5. He was a pedophile who murdered a young girl and ends up in prison corresponding with a 19-year-old girl who expresses her own desire for seducing a young boy, which he encourages her to do while giving her tips on how to go about it.

6. Enormous and hairless, sadistically violent, and deeply philosophical, he mysteriously appears in the desert, sitting by a big boulder, awaiting the Glanton gang.

7. Thirtysomething serial killer seeks to find a perfect young male companion and re-wire his brain - i.e., perform a transorbital lobotomy - thereby turning him into a zombie sex slave. Novel loosely based on the real-life Jeffry Dahlmer.

8. From the master of transgressive fiction: Gay, drug-taking sociopath embarks on a sadistic killing spree in Amsterdam, recounting the events in graphic detail in a letter to his ex.

9. Londoner imprisoned for the necrophiliac slayings of 23 young men, escapes, flees to Louisiana, hooks up with another psychopath and the two find true love over the body of a murdered and mutilated boy in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

10. He worked as clerk in city hall collecting butterflies until he won a large prize in the British football pools, moved to an isolated house in the country, and decided to collect Miranda.