Word: dragon
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...indigestible back story!" "Toothless prequel!" "Hard to swallow!") Of the reviewers I've read, only Malcolm Jones over at Newsweek found some favor with the book, saying he preferred it to Silence, of which he "was never a huge fan," and ranking it second in the tetralogy to Red Dragon...
...rate it fourth out of four. But then I think the first three books are, in order, great (Red Dragon), merely terrific (Silence) and epically creepy (Hannibal). The writing in the new one tends to flab compared to the leanness of the earlier books. And there's a bigger problem I'll get to in a minute. For now, call Hannibal Rising an OK book from a superior writer. You'll want to get it, not just to read, and decide for yourself, but to place next to the other Lecters. It has family resemblances: a keen intelligence, a crime...
...Originally, Hannibal was a supporting character, too. The first two books have more or less the same plot. In Red Dragon, FBI profiler Will Graham, the man who caught and imprisoned Lecter, accepts his intercession and interference as a possible aid in finding a serial killer nicknamed the Tooth Fairy (because he leaves bite marks on his corpses). In The Silence of the Lambs, FBI agent Clarice Starling is tracking Buffalo Bill, and again Lecter played the brilliant, deranged, unreliable consigliere...
...insanity and insight. He's a great people-reader, exercising a hypnotic power over those he meets, and with an acute instinct for the emotional jugular. This is on display the first time Hannibal appears in the books - when Will Graham visits him in a prison cell in Red Dragon - "Graham felt that Lecter was looking through to the back of his skull. His attention felt like a fly walking around in there...
...gone so far as to fiddle with aspects of his subject's biography. In Red Dragon the young Hannibal is said to have tortured animals - the first indication of a sociopathic personality. Yet in Rising he displays kindness and closeness to a flock of swans and his favorite horse, Cesar, who affectionately recalls Hannibal when he returns to the family estate 10 years after he left...