Amy Kathleen Ryan | A Villain to Love

“Writers must be fair and remember even bad guys (most of them, anyway) see themselves as good—they are the heroes of their own lives.” –Stephen King, ON WRITING

When I wrote The Sky Chasers, the scenes I really enjoyed, the scenes I could hardly WAIT to write, always had my villain in them. Anne Mather is a plump, middle aged woman with a grandmotherly bun of silver hair and kind gray eyes. She smells like coconut cream, her cheeks glow with pinkish wholesomeness, and she’s evil to the core. As Captain of the New Horizon, a farming vessel on its way to colonize a distant planet, Anne Mather ambushes her ally ship and kidnaps all the girls, including my heroine Waverly Marshall. It’s up to Waverly to find a way back to her home ship a million miles away, and it’s Anne Mather’s job to make her doubt every move she makes.

In order to write Anne Mather, whom USA Today praised as, “a female antagonist on par with the literary likes of… Dolores Umbridge,” (Can you tell I’m proud to have my villain compared to one of J.K. Rowling’s?) I had to imagine someone committing a really horrible act with the conviction that it was the right thing to do. I made this choice as a writer because the quote above from Stephen King strikes me as absolutely correct. Nobody wants to see himself as bad, least of all Anne Mather who is the religious leader of her ship as well as the captain. Before the night of the attack that orphans dozes of children, I imagine her praying on it, and really believing that she gets the go-ahead from God.

Some people might be uncomfortable with my making such a terrible villain a religious leader, and I don’t blame them. It is awful to think of a pious woman making morally reprehensible choices, but I did this for a reason: Surely Pope Gregory IX, the architect of the Spanish Inquisition, prayed about his deeds which resulted in the murders of thousands, perhaps millions of Jews, Moslems, and Christian protestants, all in the name of God. John Hathorne, one of the judges during the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts that culminated in the deaths of twenty innocent people, probably prayed during the night before he condemned his victims to death. And most recently, members of the Westboro Baptist Church have picketed the funerals of our servicemen because they object to allowing gays in the military, so somehow that makes it okay to scream at a fallen hero’s mom on the absolute worst day of her life. As difficult it is to imagine, all these horrible people probably believed that God had given them the go-ahead for their heinous crimes, too.

Does this mean religion and evil go hand in hand? Certainly not. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, and Reverend Desmond Tutu were all devoted religious men, heroes who defended ideas of non-violence and loving acceptance. So why do some people get it so awfully, horribly wrong? How can followers of Jesus, who told us to “turn the other cheek,” warp this idea of tolerance into a justification for burning people at the stake? Why do so many of Jesus’ followers, a pacifist himself, use his words to justify violence? It boggles my mind, and for that reason, I wanted to find out for myself by inhabiting the mind of a religious villain.

What I came up with feels right to me, and it can be summed up by Lord Acton’s observation: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” A lot of religious leaders believe they are following the path God has set out for them. What if God leads them to a position of power? Doesn’t that mean God thinks you’re the best person for the job? This representative of God is suddenly beyond reproach because since God is perfect, his Chosen Leader must be perfect, too. That vital mechanism inside everyone’s brain that questions our leadership gets turned off. If people really believe God has anointed their leader, if they feel wronged by their enemies, if they think they have no choice, they really might follow their prophet right off a cliff.

But this kind of fervor doesn’t last forever. Anne Mather gets her comeuppance, and eventually must face up to the fact that she doesn’t always get it right. She makes mistakes like the rest of us, and some of her mistakes have horrifying consequences.

I didn’t write The Sky Chasers with a view to redeem Anne Mather. I don’t think she really deserves redemption. But I did want to make her human. I wanted her to be plausible, just like any of my other characters. And because I’m maybe a little wicked myself, I wanted my reader to have some moments of sympathy for Anne Mather. I wanted to encourage the reader to read closely, pay attention, and tease out Mather’s contradictions, because that’s what we all should be doing, all the time, lest we follow our own leaders over the edge of a cliff. It’s happened before, after all. It could happen again.

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