Welcome to the dark world of Hannibal Lecter. Enjoy his
favorite music while dining on some gourmet home-cooked liver with some
fava beans and a nice chianti.
Senator Martin and Hannibal Lecter considered each other, one extremely bright,the other not measurable by any means known to man.
- The Hannibal Lecter Homepage. One of the first and best. This page is great!
- Thomas Harris, the author, has a brilliant ability to draw the reader into a very dark world. Visit his official website. Before writing Silence of the Lambs, he wrote The Red Dragon where he first introduces the character of Lecter. There was a movie made of The Red Dragon called Manhunter. It isn't as good as the movie of Silence but it is OK. The man who played Lecter in that did a creditable job. Of course, Hopkins, as Lecter, far outshines him. Hopkin's Lecter is divinely sexy.
- The new version of The Red Dragon, with Anthony Hopkins as Lecter and Ed Norton as Graham, is
now playing. While it was a good movie, it didn't quite meet my expectations and, at the same time,
it gave me new respect for the first movie made of this book, Manhunter. While it had many flaws and left a lot out, it managed to
capture the mood of the book to a degree that doesn't seem to occur in the new one. However, the movie is still well worth seeing, if only
for Hopkins' Hannibal.
- The Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed With the Sun, painted by Blake, was featured in the novel of the same name by Thomas Harris.
- Reviews
- Red Dragon Message Board
- He's BACK, article about screenwriter, Tally, from Shivers
- Puffed for Dragon, NY Post
- Hannibal, Inc., Time
- Hopkins Sinks Teeth in Red Dragon
- The Silence
of the Lambs,
another great site for Lecter lore, loaded with articles, pictures and sounds. - The Shrieking of the Lambs
- Hannibal's Place
- Hannibal & Clarice: No Ordinary Love
- Digesting "Hannibal," Two noted authors discuss an unspeakable love, how the critics got it wrong -- and the semiotics of brain eating. Someone got it wrong and I don't think it was "the critics."
- Clueless Lecter Fans Call Critics Clueless, my own response to the above article.
- Original Review from Salon.com
- Off His Feed by David Bowman. Thomas Harris' undigestible mixture of black comedy and sublime horror causes one fan to lose his appetite.
Dr. Lecter amused himself--he has extensive internal resources and can entertain himself for years at a time. His thoughts were no more bound by fear or kindness than Milton's were by physics. He was free in his head.
Hannibal
Hannibal, as I'm sure you all know, is the newly released sequel to Silence of the Lambs. Like the other Harris fans, I have been anxiously awaiting this story for years. Like the other fans, I wanted to love it. I expected to love it. But, loath as I am to admit it, I do not love it.
The characters I met in this new novel are not the ones I knew from the previous ones. They are strangers. Their behavior does not follow from what we know of them. The book seems to have been hastily thrown together, which is strange considering the length of time since Silence. Typos suggest it wasn't even proofread with much care. The following will contain spoilers so, if you haven't read the book yet, proceed at your own risk.
The ending is the strangest part of the book. On the one hand, I am happy that Clarice ended up with Hannibal. I certainly would in her place. But I find it hard to believe she would have ever agreed to forget about trying to arrest him and become his lover instead. Explaining it in terms of hallucinogenic drugs seems a little gimmicky, like a deus in machina. I mean, Harris didn't really go through her mind and her motivations in a way that made the change believable. There was a bit about an imaginary dialog with her father and confrontation with his actual bones. But it didn't make her change of heart believable to me.
In Silence, Lecter stressed the impossibility of explaining him causally. "Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences. You've given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. You've got everybody in moral dignity pants - nothing is ever anybody's fault." But Hannibal tries to do exactly that. Reduce him to a set of influences. And what influences! His sister was cannibalized so he has to eat others? And Lecter was so wonderful as a mystery. "Solving" that mystery by giving us the "origin" of his compulsion takes away from it.
I hate to make this comparison but it seems unavoidable. I used to be on the Anne Rice mailing list. We discussed the Vampire Chronicles and compared the various novels in this serial of novels. There was a considerable difference between Interview With the Vampire and the subsequent sequels. The first novel was a lot darker and more compelling. Later, she rehabilitated Lestat who had been a negative character at first and made him into the main character. She gave him all sorts of powers he didn't have in the first novel, had him kill only "evil doers" and made him rich. The Lecter in Red Dragon and Silence is in prison. His only resources are in his mind. He is dark and dangerous. The Lecter in Hannibal is rich, kills mainly evil doers and becomes more and more benevolent. He is still an outlaw, as is Lestat, but (gods, I hate to say this but it's like saying itself!) more like "the Fonz" (Happy Days) was an outlaw. I realize his character was so compelling that people want him to be likeable. But I didn't want it to happen at the expense of his mystique.
Some readers have suggested that Harris wrote this as a joke. Others
have speculated that he capitulated to pressure from Hollyweird for a
sequel which he just wasn't inspired to create. Whatever the case, I will
always remain in awe of Harris for The Red Dragon and Silence of
the Lambs.
