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Rating: 
Summary: HANNIBAL HEAVEN
Review: Alright Hannibal fans here it is, the unauthorized guide to the Hannibal Lecter trilogy. After just finishing Yvonne Tasker's excellent book on The Silence Of The Lambs (BFI, 2002), this book showed up on my doorstep. I was in heaven. Daniel O'Brien has done a great job of covering all three books and films. With 32 pages of color and b&w pictures, this book sets the record straight. I was especially impressed by O'Brien's giving Manhunter a fair shake by letting the facts speak for themselves. A must have for all true fans. Pass the Chianti.
Rating: 
Summary: Informative, but disappointing
Review: I had expected something with a little more depth, but perhaps that's because I'm a member of a vanishing species (someone who majored in literature in college). Harris' novels are arguably the most "literate" crime thrillers around, displaying not only loving research of forensics and police work but a command of European literature and culture much deeper than mere "props" for the erudition of Hannibal Lecter. I have seen very little commentary on them that discusses this, or the deft mingling of "our common squalor" (a phrase from "Lambs") with images from Donne, Eliot and Dante. Lecter is also a character with a grand ancestry in history and myth, and I would have loved to see an exploration of what he owes both to genuine killers and the demons of fiction and tradition.What I got was a book that would have been half the length had it not been padded out with the resumes of the films' stars, producers and directors. While it's interesting to know why the first Red Dragon movie, "Manhunter," contained some puzzling alterations and omissions, I don't need to know everything about the filmography of everyone involved, or the minute studio politics -- that doesn't do much to elucidate the novels or the finished pictures. By contrast, author O'Brien's appreciation of Harris' abilities and intentions as a writer is culpably shallow. One example: his interpretion the title-page quotation in Lambs, "Need I look for a Death's Head in a ring, that have one in my face?" While he sources it correctly (Donne's Devotions) he doesn't even bother to connect it with the Death's Head Moth used by killer Jame Gumb to mark the flayed remains of his victims and to represent his ambition to be transformed through wearing their skins; instead he suggests it is chiding the reader for interest in fictional killers when so many real ones can be found in the newspaper. The deeper implication that Lecter's monstrosity parallels something that might be mined out of all our psyches (given greater play in HANNIBAL) doesn't even occur to him. I throw up my hands. As for the all-but-operatic repetition of theme, imagery and incident that occurs throughout the novels, or the delicious subtle parallels between characters -- such as Will Graham's relationship to his family as a stepfather versus Francis Dolarhyde's as a stepchild, pointed up by Graham's facial mutilation at the end of the book -- well, let's say I was hoping to see a good critic go to work on that, and I'm still waiting. In fact, it's clear that O'Brien is interested in only the most banal conventions of storytelling (allowing Graham to "be a hero" versus the sometimes scalding insights Harris includes in his internal monologues) and doesn't much care whether the author was trying to do anything other than keep the reader's attention. An intriguing book for a student of cinema, but not much use to a reader.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome!!!
Review: Just great. It is a must-read for every fan of the Hannibal Lecter books/films. I would be truly shocked if i discovered that there are any important (or not so important) information about the Lecter phenomenon that is not in it. If you are a fan of Hannibal and have not read this book, do it.
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