Villainous Me

Bakker does something rather strange with some characters. Rather than going out and out and taking the perspective of certain characters, he'll instead have a third person narrator tell thing from a given perspective.

In this case, back in the Meorn Wilderness (The Mop), we're given some things from the perspective of Soma, the one among Achamian's party revealed to be a skin-spy. As was made pretty clear in Neuropath, Bakker's got no problem writing disturbing things, and even from the first few pages of chapter six of The White-Luck Warrior this is what we're given from Soma's perspective.

Bakker doesn't just make his villains evil, he makes them despicable while also being darkly sympathetic. He does so by talking, for example, about the mixture of hate and lust and desire that the skin-spy Soma feels whenever he looks at Mimara. In fact, where other authors might disturb readers by showing them something aberrantly different and abjectly terrifying, Bakker's m.o. appears to be trying to disturb people by showing them parts of such villainy within themselves.

This quality among his villains is another thing that makes his works great, and that will likely keep his fantasy writing largely underground.