Hannibal - Hardcover

Harris, Thomas

3.81

106,801 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0434009407 ISBN 13: 9780434009404

Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd, 1999

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

It is an axiom of behavioural science that vampires are territorial, while cannibals range widely. Hannibal Lecter killed nine people before he was caught. Five on his escape. Two of his victims survived - one of them is in an asylum -but the other craves revenge. Mason Verger, a paraplegic confined to a respirator since his encounter with Dr Lecter, can move only the fingers of his crippled right hand across the soft blanket that cover his lifeless body. But Verger is very rich and very influential, and his reach extends into the echelons of power and around the world. His need to find Lecter is insatiable. In Clarice Starling he has the prefect bait. As gripping and terrifying as any reader of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS w ould expect. Simply unputdownable.

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Review:

Hannibal. Dr Hannibal Lecter. "A brief silence follows the name, always, in any civilized gathering," wrote Thomas Harris at the beginning of his stunning The Silence of the Lambs in 1988. You don't want him in your head, you don't want you in his head. Now, a decade later, Lecter is back--ready to take up his place as one of the cult figures of contemporary fiction. Almost a modern myth, in fact, if the scale, and thrill, of the publication of Hannibal is anything to go by. Harris's book is "news": not only "book news" but "real" news, one of the biggest publishing events of the decade in terms of print run (one million copies worldwide), film rights (Hollywood has paid six million dollars for the book: Anthony Hopkins and Julianne Moore will star) and cultural cachet.

The serial killer--like his counterpart, the psychologist-profiler--is a figure for our times; "In the contemporary mind," as one psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas, has put it, "the serial killer is the statement of evil". Psychiatrist and killer, Lecter gives a peculiar twist to that evil (and Harris has always been interested in the precarious division between killer and cure). In Red Dragon, published in 1981, Will Graham was one of the first of the fictional profilers thinking and feeling his way into the minds of the killers he pursued. Behind bars, Lecter was a charged, but compelling, presence--an enigma who promised to be a key to psychopathic crime if only someone were genius enough to understand him. Jack Crawford tried, and then Clarice Starling. Now, as if in response to those who wanted to know more, comes Hannibal, a novel which constantly threatens to bring Lecter to life through its (sometimes grisly) pages. "Dr. Hannibal Lecter's fingerprint card is a curiosity and something of a cult object": Harris is the one who knows, who has "been there", and takes his readers into Lecter's world of curious courtesy and exquisite taste, sickening cruelty and loving murder. Both Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs were masterpieces of plot and suspense; though complex and plotted, this is rather more "Hannibal's book": no-one who wants to know, and suffer with, Lecter--his past victims, his past life, his strange feelings for Starling--can miss this brilliant piece of mythmaking. --Vicky Lebeau

Review:

"Strap yourself in for one heck of a ride -- it'll scare your socks off."
-- "The Denver Post
"Relentless -- endlessly terrifying."
-- "Los Angeles Times
"Interested in getting the hell scared out of you? Buy this book on a Friday ... lock all doors and windows. And by Monday, you might just be able to sleep without a night-light."
-- "Newsday
Don't miss Thomas Harris's "New York Times bestsellers:
Red Dragon
Black Sunday

"From the Paperback edition.

"Strap yourself in for one heck of a ride it'll scare your socks off." Denver Post
"Relentless endlessly terrifying." Los Angeles Times
"Interested in getting the hell scared out of you? Buy this book on a Friday ... lock all doors and windows. And by Monday, you might just be able to sleep without a night-light." Newsday
Don't miss Thomas Harris's New York Times bestsellers:
Red Dragon
Black Sunday"

"Strap yourself in for one heck of a ride--it'll scare your socks off."--Denver Post

"Relentless--endlessly terrifying."--Los Angeles Times

"Interested in getting the hell scared out of you? Buy this book on a Friday ... lock all doors and windows. And by Monday, you might just be able to sleep without a night-light." --Newsday

Don't miss Thomas Harris's New York Times bestsellers:
Red Dragon
Black Sunday

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