The Good Villain is the first 100 pages of a novel in progress. The novel is a parody of the biography genre and a satire of American culture, specifically Southern American culture. The biographer, David Johnson, travels to Starkville, Mississippi to interview and interrogate fictional author, Avis James, and his friends and family. The critical introduction of the same name describes how authors Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, and Vladimir Nabokov have influenced the novel in terms of the whimsical, the grotesque, and the humorous.