Hannibal (Hannibal Lecter, #3) in Fannibal Book Group

May 24, 2014 Joanna rated it really liked it

This is terrible and fabulous at the same time. Like going to a art museum and finding the most amateurish-looking and ugly painting, and that, THAT piece somehow having the most resonance with you, and you spend the rest of the day wondering what has going on in the mind of that twisted but undeniably talented artist who would make something so confrontational and and uh... just dealing with liking something weird.

The first time I tried to read it, when it first came out, I couldn't get past t This is terrible and fabulous at the same time. Like going to a art museum and finding the most amateurish-looking and ugly painting, and that, THAT piece somehow having the most resonance with you, and you spend the rest of the day wondering what has going on in the mind of that twisted but undeniably talented artist who would make something so confrontational and and uh... just dealing with liking something weird.

The first time I tried to read it, when it first came out, I couldn't get past the few chapters. Maybe not even the first chapter. It was soooooo bad. And it still is. It is a really, really bad mystery/suspense novel. Like romance, mystery/suspense novels have a structure that's promised the reader, and if it's not delivered, it's incredibly disappointing. Not just "the bad guy should get it in the end," but even in their universe. There is an order and structure to the mystery/suspense world, and it gets into everything. How the bad guys act, how law enforcement reacts, family life, politics. Everything gets slotted into either "correct" or "chaos," the parameters of which change from author to author. Mystery/suspense is about where these lines are drawn, and it draws people who are interested in contemplating these lines.

The first two Hannibal Lecter novels had it, even though the books, at least for their genre, were a little bit weird. Every baroque, overwritten page of Hannibal however, is like, "That line? Fuck that line. That line is stupid. We can contemplate about how dumb it is." Which makes sense actually, because Hannibal Lecter is the character in those earlier books that transcends the structures of their universe. "There isn't a word for what Hannibal Lecter is," (a line I am misquoting, fersure). Other characters commune with him as if he were an oracle, an oracle of Weird. "oh Weird one, show us what our structure-constrained eyes cannot let us see" and then Hannibal Lecter says some weird ass baroque shit, like in . "If you were to escape, tortoise, you would be forgotten almost immediately, invisible. It is your enclosure that makes you a god." & "The monkey touches himself not to feel pleasure, but to demonstrate to the zookeeper that he cannot be controlled." hahaha. Anyway, the hell was my point, that cannibalistic serial killers are strange and Hannibal Lecter is a pretentious baroque weirdo? And that a book that focuses on him is gonna be pretentious, baroque and weird? Woah! earth-shattering. i better slow down.

Hannibal belongs in the horror genre, not suspense. For characters beside Hannibal, it's a psychological slasher flick, like "Run he's got a knife! RUUUNNNN! He's gonna eat you ahhhh". But for Hannibal himself, it's cosmic. Get too close to Hannibal, he'll start warping your reality and mind so much it starts becoming cosmic horror to you, too, where people and their horrors are utterly insignificant, God is indifferent at best and mindlessly cruel at worst, and lines between correct and chaos don't matter. At least, that is how it seems to me, especially reading this after watching the Hannibal TV show, which I am convinced takes place in THIS universe, despite technically being a prequel of Red Dragon (the book Red Dragon itself seems to take place in a different universe entirely).

Even then though, it's still not a good book. Decentish, but execution is seriously lacking. The horror themes can really be pushed further, but as it is they are kinda just... meh. Like he was working intuitively, but not skillfully. ...more

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