Hannibal Rising

Hannibal Lecter fans rejoice--his origins and ghastly early life are now available for your gore-hungry ears. Read and even performed by its author, HANNIBAL RISING is a dark, grisly yet elegant tale, which may generate some sympathy for one of fiction's most twisted killers. Harris's deep Southern accent, steeped in honeysuckle, hound dogs, molasses, and academia, is an odd match for some of the material, though his dead-on German and French accents (the story is set in the late days of WWII and concerns Lecter's childhood) redeem the recording from becoming a sonorous song of the South. One can't say Harris overplays or underplays; he delivers a creditable performance that does justice to his modern macabre classic. D.J.B. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

December 4, 2006
Twenty-five years after Hannibal Lecter, a cross between Professor Moriarty and Jack the Ripper, first invaded the imaginations of countless readers worldwide in Red Dragon, bestseller Harris has crafted an unmemorable prequel that's intended to explain the origins of Lecter's evil. Fans of Harris's previous Lecter novel, Hannibal (1999), already know the major trauma that transformed the young Lecter-the murder of his beloved younger sister, Mischa, during WWII-which the author describes in more grisly detail. Lecter also has an unusual love interest, his uncle's Japanese wife, Lady Murasaki, but the bulk of the narrative focuses on Lecter's quest for revenge on those he holds responsible for Mischa's death. Unfortunately, the prose and plotting lack the suspenseful power of Red Dragon or The Silence of the Lambs, and will leave many feeling that with such a masterful monster as Lecter, less is more.