100 Greatest Fictional Villains: Jupiter

Appears in: The Deptford Mice, The Deptford Histories

  Robin Jarvis was a huge influence on me growing up. The man was (and doubtless still is, though it’s been a while) a natural storyteller, who never shied away from writing the darkest, strangest, most eerily vivid children’s and young adult stories imaginable. He plundered history, folklore, and (presumably) fevered childhood nightmares in order to create richly detailed supernatural worlds. There were the haunted sewers and cornfields of the Deptford Mice trilogy, and the even more terrifying twilight past of its sprawling prequel trilogy, the Deptford Histories. There were the gruesome secrets of Whitby and the pagan terrors of the Wyrd Museum.

  One of Jarvis’ most noteworthy abilities (apart from his gift for making readers both afraid of and afraid for anthropomorphic animals) is his knack for writing villains. Rather than garden-variety crooks and fiends, he took evident relish in conjuring up the most over-the-top, hateful, gloating, irredeemably ruthless villains, who for all their Satanic excesses are still somehow completely serious and convincing threats. Jupiter, the shadowy, sorcerous god-king of a particularly vile reach of London sewer, is the original Jarvis villain. Cunning, savage, pitiless, steeped in supernatural mystery and horror and utterly lacking in the slightest trace of any softer emotions, he makes the most brutal verminous warlord Brian “Redwall” Jacques ever penned look like a particularly mischevious Care Bear.    

  Jupiter’s first appearance, as a pair of hideous, brooding crimson eyes boring out of the subeterranean darkness in 1989’s “The Dark Portal” was a mission statement; Jarvis had every intention of inflicting the chills on his young readership, and warned off the more timid child reader by sending his plucky mouse hero to a nameless doom in Jupiter’s clutches at the end of the first chapter. This wasn’t going to be a ride of cheery hi-jinks and daring scrapes for the anthropomorphic cast, where the villain is humbled and thwarted at every turn, but nature red in tooth and claw, heightened by creative use of evil magic and some exploration into the eeriest buried secrets of England’s landscape, where embattled colonies of cute animals face up to the remnants of a superstitious heathen past that are still very much alive and hungry. Jupiter’s exploits got worse and worse with time, culminating in a Ragnarok-like confrontation that brought the trilogy to a suitably shattering conclusion.