Synopses & Reviews
HE IS ONE OF THE MOST HAUNTING CHARACTERS
IN ALL OF LITERATURE.
AT LAST THE EVOLUTION OF HIS EVIL
IS REVEALED.
Hannibal Lecter emerges from the nightmare of the Eastern Front, a boy in the snow, mute, with a chain around his neck.
He seems utterly alone, but he has brought his demons with him.
Hannibals uncle, a noted painter, finds him in a Soviet orphanage and brings him to France, where Hannibal will live with his uncle and his uncles beautiful and exotic wife, Lady Murasaki.
Lady Murasaki helps Hannibal to heal. With her help he flourishes, becoming the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France.
But Hannibals demons visit him and torment him. When he is old enough, he visits them in turn.
He discovers he has gifts beyond the academic, and in that epiphany, Hannibal Lecter becomes deaths prodigy.
From the Hardcover edition.
Review
"Harris' handling of the wartime violence is...impressive, as swift and vicious as the blitzkrieg itself....The Hannibal of this novel isn't the monstrously evil being who enthralled us in The Silence of the Lambs." Los Angeles Times
Review
"[Harris] is ruining one of the great villain franchises of all time....Tom, that very profitable Hannibal franchise is played out. Come home." USA Today
Review
"Hannibal Rising is a book of gore, and while it means to explain how Hannibal's obsession with Clarice is rooted in the trauma of Mischa's death, there's just too much blood on the pages to see anything all that clearly." New York Daily News
Review
"Hannibal Rising [is Harris's] final (please!) effort to cash in on a once-fine franchise that fell from grace....The reader who begins with this new book will have no idea why any of [Harris's] older ones are well regarded." Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Review
"[W]hile it is not Harris's best book that would still be Red Dragon it comes in second....I read Hannibal Rising in one day, and I was entertained throughout. But when I put it down, I wasn't longing for more. What I wanted instead was to see what other kinds of stories this gifted storyteller has to tell." Newsweek
Review
"The violence, though stunning, is so poorly described it doesn't frighten....Harris should have stifled Lecter after Silence. Hannibal gave me indigestion, and Hannibal Rising didn't leave me hungry for more either. (Grade: D)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"Harris has fashioned a banal if violent revenge saga that owes more than a little to Jerzy Kosinski's The Speckled Bird....Harris has pretty well worn out the killer/epicurean dichotomy." Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
"Hannibal Rising would have been truly interesting, and more disturbing, if Mr. Harris had presented us with a moment when Hannibal could have turned back or even thought about stepping away from violence. But he doesn't." Dallas Morning News
Review
"While Harris has explained, in gripping detail, Hannibal Lecter's mysterious origins, perhaps Lecter is a more frightening character in Silence of the Lambs, where his childhood traumas, his dark closet of memories remained tightly shut." Boston Globe
Synopsis
He is one of the most haunting characters in all of literature.
At last the evolution of his evil is revealed...
Hannibal Lecter emerges from the nightmare of the Eastern Front, a boy in the snow, mute, with a chain around his neck.
He seems utterly alone, but he has brought his demons with him.
Hannibal's uncle, a noted painter, finds him in a Soviet orphanage and brings him to France, where Hannibal will live with his uncle and his uncle's beautiful and exotic wife, Lady Murasaki.
Lady Murasaki helps Hannibal to heal. With her help he flourishes, becoming the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France.
But Hannibal's demons visit him and torment him. When he is old enough, he visits them in turn.
He discovers he has gifts beyond the academic, and in that epiphany, Hannibal Lecter becomes death's prodigy.
About the Author
Thomas Harris began his writing career covering crime in the United States and Mexico, and was a reporter and editor for the Associated Press in New York City. His first novel, Black Sunday, was published in 1975, followed by Red Dragon in 1981, The Silence of the Lambs in 1988, and Hannibal in 1999.