95 of 102 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
unsettling, October 13, 2000
This review is from: Red Dragon (Mass Market Paperback)
Harris first rocketed up the bestseller lists with his excellent terrorism thriller Black Sunday. His antihero Hannibal the Cannibal exploded into the public consciousness after Jonathan Demme's excellent movie version of Silence of the Lambs (1991) came out, with Anthony Hopkins brilliant creepy performance as Lecter. And, of course, fans and Hollywood have had an anxious 11 year wait for Harris to finally publish a sequel. But many people may not realize that Hannibal Lecter first appeared, albeit in a cameo role, in the novel Red Dragon and in Michael Mann's capable movie version, Manhunter (1986). If you've missed this book, I urge you to try it; in many ways it is Harris's best work.
FBI Special Will Graham has retired to Sugar Loaf Key, FL with his new wife Molly and her son Willie. Retired because of his nearly fatal encounter with a linoleum knife wielding Hannibal Lecter, whose capture he was responsible for, and because of the emotional troubles that have accompanied his ability to develop an almost extrasensory empathy for such killers, such that he has trouble purging their feelings from his own psyche. His peaceful idyll is disrupted when his old boss, Jack Crawford, shows up and asks for his help in catching The Tooth Fairy, a serial killer who is notorious for the tooth marks he leaves and for dicing his victims with shards of broken mirrors. Reluctantly agreeing to join the chase, Graham decides, in order to recapture the mindset that has made him so eerily effective in prior cases, to visit Hannibal Lecter in the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. There the administrator, Dr. Frederick Chilton, shares an anecdote about Hannibal that demonstrates just how horrible he is:
"On the afternoon of July 8, 1976, Dr. Lecter complained of chest pain. His restraints were removed in the examining room to make it easier to give him an electrocardiogram. One of his attendants left the room to smoke, and the other turned away for a second. The nurse was very quick and strong. She managed to save one of her eyes."
"You may find this curious." He took a strip of EKG tape from a drawer and unrolled it on his desk. He traced the spiky line with his forefinger. "Here, he's resting on the examining table. Pulse seventy-two. Here, he grabs the nurse's head and pulls her down to him. Here, he is subdued by the attendant. He didn't resist, by the way, though the attendant dislocated his shoulder. Do you notice the strange thing? His pulse never got over eighty-five. Even when he tore out her tongue.
I don't think we're any closer to understanding him than the day he came in.''
After tabloid reporter Freddie Lowndes splashes this visit all over the pages of The Tattler, the killer too contacts Lecter who urges him to attack Graham. Thus begins a suspenseful, violent minuet as Graham develops increasing insight into the killer's methodology and psychoses, the killer plans his next kill (he's on a Lunar schedule) and Hannibal pulls strings from the dark background. Harris provides fascinating detail on police procedure, he writes savvily about how the FBI uses the media and the inventiveness of the crimes he dreams up is genuinely disturbing. But the most interesting part of the story is the delicate mental balance that Graham has to maintain in order to think like the killers but still remain sane. And as Graham penetrates further into the killer's mind, Harris reveals more and more background about the Tooth Fairy, Francis Dolarhyde, who it turns out was a horribly misshapen baby, abandoned by his mother and raised by a demented grandmother, early on manifesting the now classic signs of the serial murder--torturing animals and the like. This background and Will Graham's troubles dealing with the thought patterns he shares with Dolarhyde raise questions about what separates us from such men and whether there's a formula for creating such evil beings. Is it really simply a matter of psychosexual abuse of young boys and, presto chango, you've created a serial killer?
In addition to this kind of portrayal of the psychotic as victim, our effort to deal with these creatures has resulted in a sizable batch of thrillers where the serial killer is portrayed as a nearly superhuman genius. This flows from the same impulse that makes folks so willing to believe that assassinations are conspiracies. It is extremely hard, as a society, to face the fact that nondescript shlubs like David Berkowitz and Lee Harvey Oswald and Richard Speck and James Earl Ray are really capable of causing so much social disruption. Their crimes are so monumental that we want the killers to be equal in stature to the crimes. The sad truth of the matter is that these monsters are, in fact, generally hapless losers. They are not Lecterlike geniuses.
That said, Hannibal is still one of the great fictional creations of recent times, our age's version of Dracula or Frankenstein, and Harris's imaginative story makes for a great, albeit unsettling, read with more food for thought than most novels of the type.
GRADE: A
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An overlooked gem, June 14, 2000
This review is from: Red Dragon (Mass Market Paperback)
I read Hannibal first. That was probably a mistake, but if you did the same thing, make sure you pick up a copy of Red Dragon. This novel by Thomas Harris is the best, in my opinion, of the three "Hannibal Lecter" books. Will Graham is a profiler that is brought on the case of the Tooth Fairy, a serial murderer killing entire families. This is what makes the book so good. Even though the murders in Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal are gruesome, it isn't as though most of us really worry about a death like that. But the fear of someone breaking into your home, which is supposed to be a haven, and murdering not only you but also the people you love the most--that is a real fear that many share.
One of the great things in this book, as opposed to SotL, is how we get in the head of the killer. We learn about his childhood not in a dossier or a debriefing but from his own memories. In the end, the killer is conflicted, torn between fulfilling what he believes is his destiny and doing what he knows is right, and I was actually able to empathize with him because of the suberb characterization.
I am a stickler for research. This book is well researched. Nothing sticks out as wrong, everything advances the plot, and the subplots, like the relationship between Will and his wife Molly, only enhance the read. I guarantee you will not be able to put this book down, this is not a leisurely read. I thought the movies of Red Dragon (called Manhunter) and Silence of the Lambs were excellent, and I'm looking forward to Hannibal, but the books can't be beat.
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34 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great horror book, December 15, 1999
The Red Dragon by Thomas Harris is probably one of the scariest, graphic books ever written. It's a thriller through all 454 pages of it. The setting is modern day in Virginia. The Red Dragon is the prequal to The Silence of the Lambs and the detec tive, Will Graham, is asked to come back to the F.B.I for this special case. This book is about a retired F.B.I investigator, Graham, who is asked to come back to the F.B.I for this case. In this case, the killer, who works in a film developing lab, stalks out his victims after he watches their home videos. His name is Francis Dolarhyde and he feels that he has a Red Dragon inside of him that makes him do the horrible things he does. He is influenced by a famous painting called "The Great Red Dragon". Once you see the cover, which has a picture of a red dragon, you will realize how scary this book actually is. I had to rate this book 5 stars, and I would definately recommend it to someone. So, if you want to read, in my opinion, the scariest book ever written, The Red Dragon is the book for you.
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