There are stories that are hidden gems, and stories that have their day in the sunshine; stories of the moment, stories of the year. And then there are those stories that become so deeply, inextricably linked to, not simply pop culture, but culture in general, that refences become shorthand. Become part of the daily vernacular. For instance, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone today who wasn't familiar with Hannibal Lecter. Lob that name as an insult, and everyone knows just what you mean by its use. He's as mythic and renowned a figure as Santa Claus, and just as fictional.
My introduction came - like most of my introductions to the monsters and horror landscapes of fiction - at an early age. (Dad used to let me watch Tales From the Crypt with him when I was four.) Visits to Blockbuster video were a weekly affair, along with stops at the bookstore. The bookstore was always a chance to discover a new story; Blockbuster, on the other hand, was the place to repeatedly rent the VHS compilations of Ghostbusters cartoons and buy Sno-Caps. While our parents browsed the non-animated sections, my brother and I played a game: we walked through the horror section and tried to find the scariest box. Oh, Blockbuster, with rows of plastic, rentable cases lined up like dominoes behind the shrink-wrapped VHS boxes. No streaming service will replace the joy of picking up that crinkly, lightweight box and turning it over to read the blurb on the back.
There were indeed some scary boxes to find in the nineties, Hellraiser leaps to mind, but it was the drama section, rather than the horror, that held the box that frightened and fascinated me the most. There was something indescribably riveting for young me about the front of The Silence of the Lambs. That cool-color scheme shot of Jodie Foster's face, her eyes red like Hannibal's, her mouth covered by a death's head moth. It was neither gory, nor explanatory, instead a simple, subtle image that could only be understood by someone who'd watched the film. And yet it was provocative; obscene, almost. I walked past it week after week, curiouser and curiouser, like Alice.
When I asked my dad about it, he said, "Oh, man. Boy. That's a scary movie." Followed by that forced-air laugh he uses for emphasis rather than actual amusement.
"Why is it scary?" I wanted to know, envisioning haunted house jump scares, monsters slithering from beneath beds, the reaching, webbed hands of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
"It's about a serial killer," he said, and my mind thought 'cereal' instead. "And he eats people." Now there's an alternative to the cardboard marshmallows in Lucky Charms.
Cue my poor mom telling him not to relate such details to a five-year-old.
The poster for the 1991 film based on Thomas Harris's classic novel is still one of my favorites. I so love a simple, statement-making piece of cover art that doesn't clutter the messaging of the story. At this point, I'm extremely familiar with Dr. Lecter. First the '91 film, and then, first binged in 2019 and binged again a number of times, Bryan Fuller's TV masterpiece, Hannibal.
But up until a few months ago, I still hadn't read any of Harris's novels, aside from The Red Dragon. Since I knew i was going to tip the cap to and hang a lantern on Lambs for Long Way Down, I decided to dive in - not just to Lambs, but to Hannibal and Hannibal Rising as well. Looked at artistically and impactfully, I think Lambs is the most successful of the novels, but disagree with the critics who claim that learning Hannibal's backstory in the latter two diminishes his fearsomeness or appeal as a character. More on that later.
First, we walk with Clarice Starling down, down, down into the cold underbelly of the Baltimore Institute for the Criminally Insane, through the clanging, barred doors, past the cat calls and raving of its inmates...to the last cell on the right, where a trim, poised man sits at a table bolted to the floor.
Your mileage may vary, but I find that crime fiction and thrillers fail all too often to engage me on an emotional level. I love the genre when it's handled in a way that drops you right into the middle of the stress and fear of the case; or, even better, when the crime becomes a frame that allows the characters' inner journeys to play out in grand scale. Tana French is masterful in this sense. Harris is, too, but, at first blush, his novel feels more clinical, less lyrical. But after a few minutes, you find those absolute gem lines that so cleanly, perfectly paint you a scene that feels photographic, if not textural. And once mired within its pages, you begin to read the bravery, stoicism, and depravity not of Hannibal, but of Clarice, in all that she holds back from thinking and saying. Harris writes Clarice with a restraint that speaks to a determined repression, and relies wholly on reader interpretation, rather than outright telling. Buffalo Bill's crimes are horrific beyond comprehension, yes. but it's Clarice and her internal dilemmas, her journey, that dominate the narrative in the reader's mind, just as, to my mind anyway, it should be. She's tough, and fascinating, and sympathetic, capable and admirable. I love Hugh Dancy's Will Graham, and his relationship with Hannibal, so much from the show that I worried I'd have trouble with Clarice. But I found the opposite to be true; I found her instantly relatable...though maybe that says more about me than about her as a character, who knows.
The Silence of the Lambs feels as though it was meant to stand on its own, without sequels. But, author intent aside - I haven't researched whether Harris planned the two follow-ups all along, or if they were later creations - I don't think Hannibal or Hannibal Rising detract from what we already know. Critics have charged that the line "Nothing made me happen. I happened" is then retconned by the reveal of Hannibal's backstory. That knowing about Mischa, and the copper bathtub, and the boy who wandered up to a Soviet tank with a chain around his neck "ruins" the whole concept of Hannibal Lecter. Some readers are in love with the idea that he simply was. A monster birthed whole cloth, without reason; a full-fledged demon unhampered by memory or trauma. But if you read my books, you know me: a person's upbringing always informs their adulthood, to some extent. It would be unreasonable to think a character like Hannibal had no backstory. To assume his wickedness was only the result of some genetic flaw, or a tic of his personality; in fact, that would be far less interesting to me. Given his predilections, his civility, the traceable backstory heightens his "realness." You could put a hundred, a thousand people in those circumstances, and they would live with trauma, sure, but none of them would turn out like Hannibal. And there is something in him that is twisted; some flaw that galvanized him, so that the horror he endured became a horror he inflicted on others. In that sense, his statement in Lambs is true: nothing made him happen. He happened. Circumstances beyond his control unleashed a side of him that happened to be monstrous. It forces the reader to ask the question: Do I have a monster inside of me? If pressed, if given the proper motivation, would it come out?
Will I ever tire of this opera-loving, cannibalistic sophisticate? Unlikely. Film, literature, and pop culture still haven't tired of him, after all.
