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You know that creepy face mask Hannibal Lecter sports in The Silence of the Lambs?
Well, the reading public should imprison author Thomas Harris in it, because he is ruining one of the great villain franchises of all time.
The evil Hannibal Lecter has appeared in three earlier books by Harris: 1981's Red Dragon and 1989's Silence were book versions of No-Doz. They literally kept you up all night. 1999's Hannibal was a grisly, unimpressive sequel.
In Hannibal Rising, a prequel, Harris tries to explain the good doctor's bad behavior by detailing Lecter's traumatic childhood during World War II.
Go weep on Oprah's couch, Tom, but stop portraying Lecter as a victim. We like him fine as a monster.
Rising tells the story of the future serial killer growing up on his family's estate in Lithuania, Lecter Castle. Mommy is beautiful and cultured. Daddy the count is a true nobleman. Baby sister Mischa is so lovable. There are faithful family retainers and a brilliant Jewish tutor to nurture young Hannibal's astonishing intellect.
But World War II arrives, Nazis invade, and evil Lithuanian collaborators destroy the family and victimize Mischa in an unspeakable manner. Hannibal ends up a mute, angry child in an orphanage established by the Soviets at Lecter Castle.
Mercifully, artistic uncle Robert arrives. He whisks Hannibal to France, where he meets Robert's exotic wife, Lady Murasaki, a Japanese aristocrat who has lost family members in Hiroshima.
The rest of the novel is big helpings of fancy food, fine art and highbrow living. And Hannibal going cannibal, seeking revenge with a knife and fork on the men who killed his sweet little sis.
The novel has several fatal flaws. First, there is no childhood trauma -- ever -- that can morally justify dining on one's fellow human beings. Suddenly trying to evoke pity or worse, empathy, for Lecter just makes the reader queasy. Second is the evaporation of Harris' once-astonishing ability to write suspenseful thrillers with memorable characters.
The problem? Foreign locales.
In Silence, the Mississippi-reared, former crime reporter wrote convincingly about the FBI and American psychos. Back then, Lecter provided the perfect touch of the foreign.
But now Harris falls into positively purple prose vapors trying to capture the world of European and Asian sophisticates.
And the last reason? Tom, that very profitable Hannibal franchise is played out. Come home.
Hannibal Rising
By Thomas Harris
Delacorte, 323 pp., $27.95
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