From our friends at LitHub, here’s a breakdown of the meanest felines in the lit game… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!
The Cheshire Cat from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1856)
It might be a little ungenerous to call the Cheshire Cat mean. Lewis Carroll’s famously grinning creation is really more mischievous than he is malicious. Still, CC does seem to take a little too much pleasure in confusing and frustrating Alice—a lost youth clearly in need of some intelligible guidance from a local—with his inscrutable non sequiters. His habit of disappearing into thin air so that only his smile remains, hovering spookily in the trees, is also pretty poor social etiquette.
The cat that walked by himself from Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (1902)
In case you haven’t cracked open Kipling’s turn-of-the-century collection of animal origin stories for children recently, “The Cat That Walked by Himself” is the tale of an admirably contrarian proto-cat who, upon observing with distain Enemy and Wife of Enemy’s attempts to subdue the local fauna, tricks Wife of Enemy into letting him sit by the cave fire without submitting to a humiliating domestication. Again, it might be harsh to call the cat that walked by himself mean, but he is an outrageously smug little bastard.
Macavity the Mystery Cat aka the Hidden Paw aka the Napoleon of Cat Crime aka Idris Elba, is the all-singing, all-dancing master criminal villain of Eliot’s collection of whimsical poems and its insanely popular Andrew Lloyd Weber musical adaptation. Based on Sherlock Holmes’ arch nemesis Professor Moriarty, the ginger tabby’s nefarious deeds include cheating at cards, kidnapping, and exhibiting a general disregard for the laws of Jellicle society. For shame, Macavity.
Behemoth from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
The granddaddy of all mean literary cats. In terms of iconic feline villainy, no moggie comes close the gun-toting, cigar-chomping, joke-telling miscreant member of Woland’s entourage. Large as a hog and capable of taking human form, this demonic black warecat drinks, smokes, philosophizes ad nauseam, and generally wreaks havoc around Bulgakov’s tinderbox Moscow in what many consider to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
Mrs. Norris from the Harry Potter series (1997-2007)
Mrs. Norris is a narc. Enough said.
Church from Pet Sematary by Stephen King (1983)
Poor Church (full name Winston Churchill, which may explain things somewhat), he didn’t mean to be mean. In life, Church was a sweet, affectionate, and slightly chonk pet to his young (but doomed) owner, Ellie, and her (also doomed) family. All that changed when Church was flattened by a big ‘ol tanker truck and then interred in the titularly misspelled animal graveyard (which, TWIST, used to be an ancient Indian burial ground). Before you know it a zombified Church has burst from his burial plot and, well, all hell breaks loose with him.
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