Human inhumanity seems to dominate the news.  Builders who cut corners causing deaths when a building collapses. Airlines who decide to fly a plane known to have a fault. Prominent men who hide predatory behaviour with charm and lawyers. Gunmen who open fire on little toddlers, leaving them dead or critically injured.

Monsters, we call them. What kind of a monster, we ask, would tie a five-year-old in the sun to die of thirst? What kind of a monster would steal the life savings of a widow? What kind of a monster would bully a person until they committed suicide?

In fiction, the lines can be clearly drawn. The villains are, as one reviewer said about one of my books, people we can comfortably hate, knowing they are beyond redemption and that they’ll get their just desserts before the book ends. The rest of the cast are good and virtuous, flawed only enough to make them human.

It can be a tricky dance for a writer of historical fiction who wants to be as accurate as possible.

In every book I read, including my own, the protagonists are on the side of abolishing the slave trade, reforming the corn laws, providing pensions for war widows, and educating the village children. If they own factories, they don’t allow children to work in them and they pay fair wages. They are loved by their tenants and servants, and support all kinds of charities, including homes for fallen women.

In reality, some good people of the time opposed all those things for what seemed to them to be good reasons. Some villains were in favour for reasons of their own. The world has few monsters, and any half-way attentive student of history has to concede that – given the right circumstances – decent people can do monstrous things.

Many regency romances include the concept of ruination. We love our single mothers and even courtesans who find love and acceptance in society. In reality, the idea that women had second chances was a myth. If a gentlewoman lost her reputation, and no one married her smart quick, she couldn’t retrieve it. A few courtesans married peers, but they were never accepted socially. (Mind you, what ‘everyone knew’ was not necessarily grounds for a lost reputation. A level of discretion might mean that even a flagrant affair could be ignored.)

Given the consequences of dalliance to a woman, why are rakes so popular with authors and readers? One reviewer found my Merry Marquis in A Baron for Becky an abhorrent character for his casual affairs. And quite right, too. Even so, the fans who love Aldridge for his charm and generosity are also right. His behaviour towards women can be monstrous, but he is not a monster.

Another reader took great exception to the way the entire village turned on my heroine in House of Thorns. In a review, she took a hundred words to list all the horrible ways every other character in the book behaved, including the protagonist. I was thrilled with the emotional response, but I didn’t agree that Bear was a monster. A clumsy fool, but not a monster.

We took our son to see the movie Shazam! the day before yesterday. It was your typical ‘teenager becomes a superhero and can only save the day after he deals with his personal problems’ story, with some laughs thrown in. Shazam’s contribution to this article was the premise that the seven deadly sins, personified as monsters, dwelt within the villain and wanted to come out and infest the world. At one point, the villain asks his nasty father ‘Who is your sin? Oh, of course. Greed!’ At which point, Greed emerges and swallows the father.

I think almost anyone can become so consumed by greed, lust, sloth, pride, gluttony, envy or wrath that we cease to be humane. The more likely scenario, though, is that we cease to think of others as human. We naturally sort and categorise – it is a major strategy for understanding our world. We’re not wrong to sort and categorise human beings – black, Hindu, capitalist, bi, Australian, green-eyed, environmentalist, or a thousand other labels that are more or less descriptive of one or more characteristics of that group.

We are wrong to think that the label describes every member of the group in detail. We are wrong to demonise or sanctify groups, as Regency society demonised ‘fallen women’ and sanctified the great ladies of the ton.

I want to write stories with real people, and that includes monsters; not just the monsters who have been consumed by their sins, but ordinary men and women who are capable of monstrous behaviour.

If we name those who do terrible things as monsters, we are refusing to face up to the darkness within us. ‘This man is a monster for the way he shot innocent people. I have not shot innocent people. Therefore I am not a monster.’ Never mind that I might have ignored bullying or shared jokes that shuffled people into a group and labelled them. Even though I tolerated the demonising of that group, which is a monstrous act.

I have seen the monsters, and they are us.