Rating: 
Summary: this is awful!!!
Review: Always have been an ardent fan of Thomas Harris..discovered him long before the critics and filmmakers..but Hannibal is an LSD dream gone bad! 200 pages into this 486 page book, I have just about surrendered. Poorly constructed and organized. locales changing from city to city,country to country almost constantly; characters entering the story and leaving almost instantaneously; our Ms Starling of the FBI,a fascinating character in Silence of the Lambs disappears on page 97 of Hannibal..ever to return? If one reads the critics..this is a book of near epic proportions,enhancing the author's reputation. Makes one wonder..what book they have been reading???
Rating: 
Summary: Ridiculous ending, very disappointing after a good build-up.
Review: Much of the detailed and repetative descriptions of Italian locations was too wordy and unnecessary. Beyond that, the book picked up speed and intensity until the terribly disappointing ending, I came away angry I had read the whole thing. Definitely not recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Should have waited for the paperback.
Review: For the first time in several years I bought a book before it came out in paperback. My mistake. Hannibal was a major disappointment. The characters were cartoonish and the plot was thin. Also, the narrative portions and the ending were surreal. Too bad Hannibal Lecter didn't sautee my book with a tenderloin before I wasted my time reading it.
Rating: 
Summary: A Definite Dissapointment
Review: I can't believe after reading 400 pages of great character development that the last 100 pages would reverse itself into the cheesy plot of a daytime soap. ACK! Was Mr. Harris pressured to finish the book? We'll never know. What we do know is this book should not be put on the shelf next to his earlier work. When they make this into a movie, they WILL change the ending, unless Susan Lucci is starring!
Rating:
Summary: Fascinatingly chilling - last 5 chapters were disappointing.
Review: Started off and continued up to the last 4 or 5 chapters to be a worthy sequel to Silence of the Lambs. I felt the book should have ended earlier and would still have left the reader satisfied but wanting more. The last few chapters were "hokey" and added nothing and nowhere to go from here.
Rating: 
Summary: FANTASTIC!!!! ... though part 2 couldv'e been done better
Review: Wow! That's the first word that comes to mine. This book went well beyond what I had expected. The events that lead to the final part of the book (don't worry, I won't give nothing away) was extremely well thought out and well executed. I could find almost no loop holes in the plot.However, the section dealing with Florence couldv'e been written better. Harris definitely kept the tension high throughout but I felt he couldv'e done a better job in his description of Florence. If this section was an insignificant part of the storyline, I wouldn't have a problem. But Mr. Harris spent 100 pages on this section and I feel I'm making a valid point. I felt it deserved losing a star. Mr. Harris wanted us to feel the beauty of Florence with it's history and architecture. I assume the cities beauty contrasts well with Hannibal's ferosity. Hannibal Lecter definitely enjoys the finer things in life. But Mr. Harris spent very little time in his descriptions of the city. He tells us of churches, paintings, bridges, museums, etc. But I couldn't get a clear picture in my imagination of what they looked like. What made them beautiful. Perhaps when I read the book again, I'll have a different opinion. But my initial reaction is: he couldv'e written it better. He couldv'e have added a little more detail. Anne Rice, in her vampire books, goes into great detail about cities with it's history and art. But sometimes she overdoes it and kills whatever suspense she's built up to that point. I guess the author was trying to avoid that. Other than that, the book was FANTASTIC! To those people who hated the ending, too bad. Hey, I hated what happens to Starling too, but the fact is Starling was never a match for Lecter. Lecter had certain faults that Starling was able to use to track him, but Starling had even bigger faults that Lecter was able to exploit. Starling was never more than a tool for Lecter's amusement. It's a shame that alot of readings a too close-minded to recognize a good story when they read it. It's got to meet their exact expectations or the book's garbage. But it don't bother me, I'll just read (and enjoy it) all over again.
Rating:
Summary: Lame, insulting, pretentious, hack work - a sorry mess.
Review: Where oh where to begin? The supporters of this "novel" seem to have two points to make: this wasn't written to fit any preconceptions of a "Silence of the Lambs II" and that anyone expecting a sequel to the *movie* deserves to be disappointed. However, I would expect that an author having over ten years in which to craft a novel would have at least avoided the laughable stock characters and the hopelessly amateurish lapses in tense and character within paragraphs. The absolutely pathetic "villian" presented here would be more believable in one of the 70s-style hokey-jokey James Bond movies - eel, steroid-buffed lesbian and all. (I kept expecting a dwarf to pop out - that certainly wouldn't have been out of tune with the rest of the grotesqueries substituted in lieu of "plot"!) As for Lecter's great genius and "taste" for the finer things - what a commoner! The Great Hannibal comes across far more as an insecure bourgeois than as a sophisticated aesthete. Perhaps the most frightening part of this otherwise weak-beer book is Lecter's shopping spree - my jaw dropped, and so will yours, in his total buy-in into the consumer culture. Big-dollar "big name" stuffing for a picnic basket just does not impress me, and if Harris's point was to depict Lecter as one sick puppy, it was THIS part that did it for me. Through the course of the book, it becomes increasingly evident that Mr. Harris has spent far more time in cooking classes than in thinking about this book, and one more reference to the "carbon steel" knives would have been enough to justify a personal visit by Hannibal himself to the jumped-up gourmand that Harris seems to have become. And Bach and Dante' - really?! Our great genius doctor hasn't developed an appreciation for arts somewhat more OFF the well-trod paths? No Pettersson, or Janacek? Somehow, I'd think Lecter would have an affinity for Maturin's "Melmoth", but nope - just the most very obvious will do, I suppose. And then the ending: by now, everyone must know that Clarice is (apparantly) lost to us, and dines in cannibal lust with the doctor. I'll agree with the book's supporters that there's no reason for Harris to meet his audience's expectations based only on a viewing of the "Lambs" film, but I read this gratuitous plot twist more as an angry slap at what Harris must see as the superficial fan than as an exercise in real horror. Many here have written how they "finished it in one read" - a day or so and you're done. Small wonder - at over 100 chapters in a 480 page book, with LARGE breaks, wide line-spacing, and pretty good-sized font, this just isn't THAT big of a book. Anyone looking for more "horror" with better research and less obvious disdain for their readers should try one of the Michael Slade novels, starting with "Headhunter". For those seeking a more profound literary vision into horror, I'd recommend Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. THIS literary AND culinary dog's breakfast is an embarrasment to the author and an insult to any intelligent reader.
Rating:
Summary: Harris reclaims his characters.
Review: In Hannibal, Thomas Harris reclaims his characters from the pop culture cocktail party that began with Silence of the Lambs. After Jody Foster and Anthony Hopkins successfully translated Harris' characters from prose to cinema, the pair seemed more suitable for endless appearances on talk-shows and magazine interviews than participants in the author's grand themes of battles between dark and light. Readers should well be warned that Hannibal is grisly. However, Harris has suitably warned us of this through his other two Lector books. The maroon-eyed serial killer is, and will always be, a dangerous being. No popular worship from afar will buy any mercy when his appetite for action is piqued. He is a predator. He cannot be tamed. But, he can be predictable. Given the chance, he will kill. Given a challenge, he will persevere. With that in mind, read Hannibal as the dark journey Harris intended. The author, much like Virgil, leads you, the reader, through a dark Inferno of intigues. Clarisse Starling has more in common with Will Graham, of Red Dragon this time around. Clarisse has new lambs that disturb her sleep. The world has turned a few clicks and she is "in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." Isolation is a powerful crucible. Harris exploits it to the hilt. Much has been made of Lector's childhood recollections as a grand explanation for his condition. Rubbish. In Red Dragon, Will Graham says Lector has been labeled a sociopath because "...they don't know what else to call him." Lector's childhood recollections no more explain why he has his appetites than sociopath lucidly describes his character. He will always be an enigma; classically urbane and utterly lethal in the same paragraph. Harris' grand theme, the struggle between darkness and light, enjoys numerous variations as new and old characters move into Lector's dark circle and become influenced by the same dark forces. It is, however, his domain. Few can survive it. None are left unchanged.
Rating:
Summary: Great Story, Mediocre Ending
Review: This is the first one of Harris' books that I have read, having only seen "the Silence of the Lambs", and getting introduced to the good doctor that way. I thought the first 430 pages or so of the book were great, but what a strange ending. Seemed very out of character for Starling to do something like that. Think there will be a sequel to this one? I'm not sure what Harris has been doing for ten years, but I hope for his sake it was not concentrating on the ending of this book. I would probably reccommend it to others. Looking forward to reading Red Dragon, as I have been told it's the best one.
Rating:
Summary: This book is AWFUL.
Review: In the last hundred pages, Harris betrays everything he apparently worked hard on establishing in his previous books about Hannibal Lector. To say the characters behave inconsistently does not begin to tell the story. You will feel cheated when you get to the end of this book.
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