Ondskan ("The Evil") is a Swedish novel by Jan Guillou. Plot summary Erik Ponti is a fourteen-year-old boy living in the 1950s Stockholm lower middle class. His sadistic father beats him often, his mother rarely intervenes in the abuse and his six-year-old brother takes advantage of the situation. He excels in school subjects that interest him; "He ran the fastest and scored the most goals, could take a gargantuan beating, hit with full strength at the first punch and on top of all that he was the superior student in several subjects", which lends him a position as gang leader and favored student of half his teachers. (He compulsively leads the class to rebel against the other half, who beat the students.) He lives with violence both at home and at school and begins feeling sympathy and pity towards those he beats, when his life comes tumbling down because of the school gang's criminal activities. Betrayed by those he thought of as his friends, the gang, he is expelled from school and "pre-emptively" expelled from every school in Stockholm by his zealous and influential principal. He comes home prepared to face his father "for the last time" but is surprisingly sent to a boarding school outside of the city, the expensive and exclusive Stjärnsberg school. Away from his father and everyone who knew him, Erik is determined to make a new life without violence for himself, but the traditions of the school stop him. Unable to abide the abuse of the senior students, who make it their habit to boss around and beat those below them, "especially new and mouthy kids", he begins a spiral of escalating violence and psychological abuse under the nose of unwitting teachers and adults. Noses are broken, threats are uttered, buckets of feces thrown around and Erik spends a cold winter night soaking wet and tied to the ground. Erik and his friend and roommate Pierre hold in-depth discussions about the nature of evil, the importance of resistance and methods of fighting, while spending summer and winter breaks abroad. Erik develops a forbidden relationship with Marja, a school cook from Savonia, Finland, and wins a swimming trophy in a school championship. He is thrown out of the swimming team in an attempt to make him follow orders, and begins working out obsessively by weightlifting to vent his frustrations, panicked over the prospect of being expelled