What? No Grendel?

I've only encountered a quarter of these villains but Oliver Twist is pretty high on my to-read list. High School left a bad taste for Dickens in my mouth after we had to over-analyze Great Expectations, although I do recall Miss Havisham being a Royal Bitch.

His Dark Materials was a tour de force though, wasn't it? Philosophy, action, fantasy... You're damn right about the books being better than the movie - what a disaster. I dragged my wife to that, telling her how great the books had been. After she said, "what the hell just happened?" and I could just shake my head and say, "I don't know. I really don't know."

Did they ever make a sequel? I never bothered to check.

VC Andrews is kind of underrated. As a connoisseur of fucked-up families, you can always trust her to share the five-star monsters.