Red Dragon (Mass Market Paperback)

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

"Red Dragon" is the first book I have read by Thomas Harris. I am normally a very big Stephen King fan, but I found this book quite enjoyable nonetheless. However, like I have seen in so many books before, this had the chance of being an amazing novel, but was spoiled by a disappointing ending.

To begin, I would like to say that I do not enjoy Thomas Harris' style of writing when he uses choppy sentences and switches between the first and third person narrative. However, I soon got over that. It did not take away from the book.

Plot: 9/10--I found Francis Dolarhyde to be an extremely strange and frightening character, yet we could relate to his story. You could sense the tension between the characters as they tried to hunt him down.

Action: 8/10--This book is more of a crime drama. It is filled with more "Law and Order"-like searching than action and violence.

Characters: 9/10--Dolarhyde was extremely well-done, but Will Graham was not developed enough. He seemed like a jerk at some points despite his attempts to stop "The Dragon".

Overall: 8.5/10--This book should be at least a 9.5, but the ending was not enjoyable for me. It was an oustanding book, yes, and I will continue to read work by this author, but it seemed rushed and unoriginal. I think Mr. Harris could have come up with a better way (WARNING: SPOILER--DO NOT READ ON IF YOU WANT TO BE IN SURPRISE!) for "The Dragon" to die. It was like most horror movies today, and non suspenseful like the rest of the book. Not only did Dolarhyde suddenly lose his strength and cunning brilliance, he was killed too easily.

"Red Dragon", in conclusion, is a great piece of fiction that I cannot say enough about, but beware, the ending may be slightly disappointing to some.