October is the month for marriages gone sour, at least at the cinema this year, where the screen adaptations of "Gone Girl" and "Before I Go To Sleep" are both poised for release ("Gone Girl" was released Friday; "Before I Go To Sleep," fittingly, will be released on the 31st).

'Marriage thrillers' have been hard to avoid in the past couple of years in bookshops, where these two have been kept good company by The Husband's Secret, The Silent Wife, You Should Have Known and my own novel, Before We Met. As readers, we seem to have been hungry for stories of marital discord, for terrible secrets and worse behaviour.

Often -- though not always -- in this recent crop, it's the husbands who are the bad apples and that made me curious. It hasn't always been the case: do a Google search for :worst husbands in literature" and some of the very first hits will offer you the worst wives in literature, the worst girlfriends, the worst mothers. You'd think it was women who were the bad guys here...

Doing some thinking on the subject with well-read friends, we came to the conclusion that much of what seems like unforgivable behaviour on the part of major fictional husbands is excused or explained by their authors as having to conform to 'the system' (the Commander in The Handmaid's Tale) or just being caught in a tragic position (the Mayor of Casterbridge, who sells his wife). Even a Goodreads survey seeking to identify which fictional character would make the worst husband included Casaubon of Middlemarch whose worst crimes, surely, were being utterly selfish and boring beyond belief. Definitely not good husband material but far from an out-and-out sociopath like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca or a femme fatale like Cora of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Challenged, I set out to even the balance and identify some fictional husbands who were bad to the bone. Here are eight of the worst offenders: