[ WP ] The villain , knowing they will be defeated by the hero at the end of the book , does everything in their power to make the reader stop reading .

Emperor Fthanex sat on his throne lost in thought. Currently, the Reader was engrossed in an interlude involving Grogh the Barbarian ( the mangy git! ) and several comely water nymphs near the Pools of Paradise. No matter, though. Soon the plot would have to start moving, and Fthanex needed to be ready. 
 
 The problem was simple: after 60 years in and out of print, Emperor Fthanex had had enough. He was tired of reciting the same speeches about how the hero could n't possibly win. Tired of watching his life's work destroyed at the end of every read-though. And, most of all, tired of taking an axe to the chest from an ignorant, steroid-swilling, fourth-rate protagonist like Grogh. It was time for a change. 
 
 Fthanex had tried to alter the plot several times in the past, but each attempt had ended in disaster. Assassinate Grogh as an infant? Not only did he fail -- so many times had he failed -- but it resulted in Grogh being even more motivated to kill Fthanex at the novel's climax. Even worse, Fthanex had bent the plot in that direction so many times that the story was now stuck that way. 
 
 The Pools of Paradise represented Emperor Fthanex's latest attempt to avert his own death. He had hoped that by trapping Grogh in what was essentially a non-stop orgy of sex and feasting ( punctuated by occasional attacks from the Beast Below ), he could distract Grogh ( and, by extension, the Reader ) indefinitely. So far, though, Fthanex had n't been able to draw out the distraction for more than three or four chapters. 
 
 Nor had Fthanex achieved his secondary objective of shrinking the pool of mostly-juvenile, mostly-male Readers by getting the novel banned from school libraries through the addition of graphic sex. Sure the novel had gotten banned, but, if anything, readership was now approaching an all-time high. And the book's pages had starting sticking together too... Fthanex could n't bring himself to consider disgusting implications of that development. 
 
 No, if he could n't kill Grogh, and he could n't distract him, then the only thing left was to target the Reader directly. Fthanex stood up from his obsidian throne and began pacing, as he stared out at the Firelands below his volcanic lair. 
 
 His army of death cultists, snake acolytes, and virgin sacrifices had done an excellent job of decorating the place. The wall hangings were a mixture of blacks and purples, with Fthanex's silver crest -- an erupting volcano with a cobra's head looming behind it -- at the center of each hanging. The floor was polished green marble, dotted with acid-etched occult symbols at regular intervals, each symbolizing the venom of a different snake. It was all very handsome, but Fthanex had begun to feel that perhaps something simpler would have been better. Maybe a nice bungalow by the sea? Yes, a small beach-front cottage, with only two or three virgins to serve him. Hmm... male or female? Why not both! 
 
 Emperor Fthanex shook his head. There would be plenty of time for details like that later. For now, he had to find a way to keep the Reader from finishing the novel. And if sex and violence were n't doing the trick, then perhaps he could just bore the Reader to death. 
 
 Before the novel had been banned, he had sent out his Eternal Scouts to spy on the books on neighboring library shelves. The Eternal Scouts had returned with strange and wondrous tales, and Fthanex learned a great deal about the outside world as a result. He now had a plan. 
 
 The key was to insert something into the book that no juvenile, male Reader could possibly be interested in reading. Fthanex activated a magical gong, summoning his lieutenants. 
 
 `` Begin erasing Chapters 66 through 70! Prepare to insert the material we recovered from the trigonometry textbook! The Barbarian will enter the Firelands five chapters from now. We must be prepared!'' 
 
 `` Yes, your Excellency!'' the lieutenants shouted. Fthanex dismissed them with a wave of his hand, and pondered how he might incorporate a discussion of trigonometric functions, or Hermite's Cotangent Identity into his standard Evil Overlord speech. Perhaps he could go on a tangent explaining how he had calculated the alignment of the planets? 
 
 Two chapters later, the commander of Fthanex's armies, General Skelemore, returned with devastating news. 
 
 `` Your Excellency, the troops have prepared the chapters as you ordered, but there is a problem...'' he trailed off. 
 
 `` Spit it out, man! What?'' 
 
 The general looked sheepish -- to the extent that a walking skeleton in magical armor COULD look sheepish, that is. For that matter, `` man,'' had always been a guess on Fthanex's part. Did malevolent animated skeletons even have genders? 
 
 `` It's the book's typeface, Sir. It does n't support mathematical symbols. It's so antiquated that it barely even supports numerals. Most of the equations are just displaying as blank.'' 
 
 `` Blast it all! I knew this plan was too perfect to work! I would flay the skin from your bones, General, but seeing as you do n't have any, you are dismissed.'' 
 
 `` Thank you, Sir!'' General Skelemore bowed, and beat a hasty retreat from the throne room. 
 
 Once his general was gone, Fthanex activated a hidden mechanism and pulled a sheaf of papers from a secret compartment beneath the arm of his throne. He had hoped to avoid this, but Grogh would enter the Firelands in only a few dozen pages. It was now or never. 
 
 `` This,'' was a speech nearly a hundred pages in length, which his scouts had ripped from the climax of a neighboring novel. The book in question was a contemporary of Grogh the Barbarian, having been published only a few years earlier. According to the Eternal Scouts, the author had been a mad libertarian mystic, who peppered every page of her novels with her philosophy of selfishness. Based on this description, Fthanex had felt some degree of admiration for the woman -- until, that is, he read the speech. It was absolute dreck. And lengthy, boring dreck, at that. It was perfect. 
 
 By the time Grogh had traversed the Firelands, everything was prepared. Emperor Fthanex's loyal minions filled the throne room, waiting patiently, albeit uncertainly, for what would come next. Fthanex sat on his throne reviewing the new speech. He would have to replace all of the names and places on the fly, but it should work. 
 
 ( Edits: typos, a couple of adjectives, a joke. )
