Product Description

Sexual hunger; demonic violence; sinister logic - the lethal components of a deadly formula driving a psychopath in the grip of an unimaginable delusion; a boastful killer who sends the police tormenting notes; a tortured, torturing monster who finds ultimate pleasure in viciously murdering happy families, and calls himself...The Red Dragon. Special agent Will Graham has been assigned to similar cases before, cases where he was able to see and feel WITH the madmen, anticipate their moves and, most terrifying of all, be vulnerable to their horrifying brutality. Now Graham is reluctantly lured out of retirement, to find an opening to the evil mind of the Red Dragon. "Red Dragon" is quite probably the most suspenseful, utterly compelling thriller ever written.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #205608 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-22
• Released on: 2000-05-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780525945567
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Lying on a cot in his cell with Alexandre Dumas's Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine open on his chest, Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter makes his debut in this legendary horror novel, which is even better than its sequel, The Silence of the Lambs. As in Silence, the pulse-pounding suspense plot involves a hypersensitive FBI sleuth who consults psycho psychiatrist Lecter for clues to catching a killer on the loose.

The sleuth, Will Graham, actually quit the FBI after nearly getting killed by Lecter while nabbing him, but fear isn't what bugs him about crime busting. It's just too creepy to get inside a killer's twisted mind. But he comes back to stop a madman who's been butchering entire families. The FBI needs Graham's insight, and Graham needs Lecter's genius. But Lecter is a clever fiend, and he manipulates both Graham and the killer at large from his cell.

That killer, Francis Dolarhyde, works in a film lab, where he picks his victims by studying their home movies. He's obsessed with William Blake's bizarre painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, believing there's a red dragon within him, the personification of his demonic drives. Flashbacks to Dolarhyde's terrifying childhood and superb stream-of-consciousness prose get us right there inside his head. When Dolarhyde does weird things, we understand why. We sympathize when the voice of the cruel dead grandma who raised and crazed him urges him to mayhem--she's way scarier than that old bat in Psycho. When he falls in love with a blind girl at the lab, we hope he doesn't give in to Grandma's violent advice.

This book is awesomely detailed, ingeniously plotted, judiciously gory, and fantastically imagined. If you haven't read it, you've never had the creeps. --Tim Appelo

Review
Acclaim for the novels of Thomas Harris:

For Black Sunday:

"Frighteningly believable."
--Chicago Tribune

"Suspenseful, nightmarish."
--Los Angeles Times

"Breathtaking. All forces converge with an apocalyptic bang!"
--The New York Times

"Fast-paced, all too realistic... with a shattering climax."
--Kirkus Reviews

"A spellbinder... The race to save the Super Bowl is hair-raising, one that will keep you rooted to your chair."
--The Hartford Courant

For Red Dragon:

"Red Dragon is an engine designed for one purpose--to make the pulse pound, the heart palpitate, the fear glands secrete."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A gruesome, graphic, gripping thriller... Extraordinarily harrowing."
--The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

"Want to faint with fright? Want to have your hair stand on end? Want to read an unforgettable thriller with equal parts of horror and suspense? Harris was obviously only warming up with his best seller Black Sunday."
--Daily News (New York)

"Irresistible... A shattering thriller... Readers should buckle themselves in for a long night's read because from the first pages... Harris grabs hold."
--Publishers Weekly

"The scariest book of the season."
--The Washington Post Book World

"Easily the crime novel of the year."
--Newsday -- Review

Review
Acclaim for the novels of Thomas Harris:

For Black Sunday:

"Frighteningly believable."—Chicago Tribune

"Suspenseful, nightmarish."—Los Angeles Times

"Breathtaking. All forces converge with an apocalyptic bang!"— New York Times

"Fast-paced, all too realistic... with a shattering climax."—Kirkus Reviews

"A spellbinder... The race to save the Super Bowl is hair-raising, one that will keep you rooted to your chair."—Hartford Courant

For Red Dragon:

"Red Dragon is an engine designed for one purpose—to make the pulse pound, the heart palpitate, the fear glands secrete."—New York Times Book Review

"A gruesome, graphic, gripping thriller... Extraordinarily harrowing."—Plain Dealer, Cleveland

"Want to faint with fright? Want to have your hair stand on end? Want to read an unforgettable thriller with equal parts of horror and suspense? Harris was obviously only warming up with his best seller Black Sunday."—Daily News, New York

"Irresistible... A shattering thriller... Readers should buckle themselves in for a long night's read because from the first pages... Harris grabs hold."—Publishers Weekly

"The scariest book of the season."—Washington Post Book World

"Easily the crime novel of the year."—Newsday

Customer Reviews

unsettling
Harris first rocketed up the bestseller lists with his excellent terrorism thriller Black Sunday. His antihero Hannibal the Cannibal exploded into the public consciousness after Jonathan Demme's excellent movie version of Silence of the Lambs (1991) came out, with Anthony Hopkins brilliant creepy performance as Lecter. And, of course, fans and Hollywood have had an anxious 11 year wait for Harris to finally publish a sequel. But many people may not realize that Hannibal Lecter first appeared, albeit in a cameo role, in the novel Red Dragon and in Michael Mann's capable movie version, Manhunter (1986). If you've missed this book, I urge you to try it; in many ways it is Harris's best work.

FBI Special Will Graham has retired to Sugar Loaf Key, FL with his new wife Molly and her son Willie. Retired because of his nearly fatal encounter with a linoleum knife wielding Hannibal Lecter, whose capture he was responsible for, and because of the emotional troubles that have accompanied his ability to develop an almost extrasensory empathy for such killers, such that he has trouble purging their feelings from his own psyche. His peaceful idyll is disrupted when his old boss, Jack Crawford, shows up and asks for his help in catching The Tooth Fairy, a serial killer who is notorious for the tooth marks he leaves and for dicing his victims with shards of broken mirrors. Reluctantly agreeing to join the chase, Graham decides, in order to recapture the mindset that has made him so eerily effective in prior cases, to visit Hannibal Lecter in the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. There the administrator, Dr. Frederick Chilton, shares an anecdote about Hannibal that demonstrates just how horrible he is:

"On the afternoon of July 8, 1976, Dr. Lecter complained of chest pain. His restraints were removed in the examining room to make it easier to give him an electrocardiogram. One of his attendants left the room to smoke, and the other turned away for a second. The nurse was very quick and strong. She managed to save one of her eyes."

"You may find this curious." He took a strip of EKG tape from a drawer and unrolled it on his desk. He traced the spiky line with his forefinger. "Here, he's resting on the examining table. Pulse seventy-two. Here, he grabs the nurse's head and pulls her down to him. Here, he is subdued by the attendant. He didn't resist, by the way, though the attendant dislocated his shoulder. Do you notice the strange thing? His pulse never got over eighty-five. Even when he tore out her tongue.

I don't think we're any closer to understanding him than the day he came in.''

After tabloid reporter Freddie Lowndes splashes this visit all over the pages of The Tattler, the killer too contacts Lecter who urges him to attack Graham. Thus begins a suspenseful, violent minuet as Graham develops increasing insight into the killer's methodology and psychoses, the killer plans his next kill (he's on a Lunar schedule) and Hannibal pulls strings from the dark background. Harris provides fascinating detail on police procedure, he writes savvily about how the FBI uses the media and the inventiveness of the crimes he dreams up is genuinely disturbing. But the most interesting part of the story is the delicate mental balance that Graham has to maintain in order to think like the killers but still remain sane. And as Graham penetrates further into the killer's mind, Harris reveals more and more background about the Tooth Fairy, Francis Dolarhyde, who it turns out was a horribly misshapen baby, abandoned by his mother and raised by a demented grandmother, early on manifesting the now classic signs of the serial murder--torturing animals and the like. This background and Will Graham's troubles dealing with the thought patterns he shares with Dolarhyde raise questions about what separates us from such men and whether there's a formula for creating such evil beings. Is it really simply a matter of psychosexual abuse of young boys and, presto chango, you've created a serial killer?

In addition to this kind of portrayal of the psychotic as victim, our effort to deal with these creatures has resulted in a sizable batch of thrillers where the serial killer is portrayed as a nearly superhuman genius. This flows from the same impulse that makes folks so willing to believe that assassinations are conspiracies. It is extremely hard, as a society, to face the fact that nondescript shlubs like David Berkowitz and Lee Harvey Oswald and Richard Speck and James Earl Ray are really capable of causing so much social disruption. Their crimes are so monumental that we want the killers to be equal in stature to the crimes. The sad truth of the matter is that these monsters are, in fact, generally hapless losers. They are not Lecterlike geniuses.

That said, Hannibal is still one of the great fictional creations of recent times, our age's version of Dracula or Frankenstein, and Harris's imaginative story makes for a great, albeit unsettling, read with more food for thought than most novels of the type.

GRADE: A

A great horror book
The Red Dragon by Thomas Harris is probably one of the scariest, graphic books ever written. It's a thriller through all 454 pages of it. The setting is modern day in Virginia. The Red Dragon is the prequal to The Silence of the Lambs and the detec tive, Will Graham, is asked to come back to the F.B.I for this special case. This book is about a retired F.B.I investigator, Graham, who is asked to come back to the F.B.I for this case. In this case, the killer, who works in a film developing lab, stalks out his victims after he watches their home videos. His name is Francis Dolarhyde and he feels that he has a Red Dragon inside of him that makes him do the horrible things he does. He is influenced by a famous painting called "The Great Red Dragon". Once you see the cover, which has a picture of a red dragon, you will realize how scary this book actually is. I had to rate this book 5 stars, and I would definately recommend it to someone. So, if you want to read, in my opinion, the scariest book ever written, The Red Dragon is the book for you.

Great book spoiled by weak ending
While thinking of how many stars to give this book, I decided on five. So I went back and finished the rest of the book and then came back, giving this book only four stars.

"Red Dragon" is the first book I have read by Thomas Harris. I am normally a very big Stephen King fan, but I found this book quite enjoyable nonetheless. However, like I have seen in so many books before, this had the chance of being an amazing novel, but was spoiled by a disappointing ending.

To begin, I would like to say that I do not enjoy Thomas Harris' style of writing when he uses choppy sentences and switches between the first and third person narrative. However, I soon got over that. It did not take away from the book.

Plot: 9/10--I found Francis Dolarhyde to be an extremely strange and frightening character, yet we could relate to his story. You could sense the tension between the characters as they tried to hunt him down.

Action: 8/10--This book is more of a crime drama. It is filled with more "Law and Order"-like searching than action and violence.

Characters: 9/10--Dolarhyde was extremely well-done, but Will Graham was not developed enough. He seemed like a jerk at some points despite his attempts to stop "The Dragon".

Overall: 8.5/10--This book should be at least a 9.5, but the ending was not enjoyable for me. It was an oustanding book, yes, and I will continue to read work by this author, but it seemed rushed and unoriginal. I think Mr. Harris could have come up with a better way (WARNING: SPOILER--DO NOT READ ON IF YOU WANT TO BE IN SURPRISE!) for "The Dragon" to die. It was like most horror movies today, and non suspenseful like the rest of the book. Not only did Dolarhyde suddenly lose his strength and cunning brilliance, he was killed too easily.

"Red Dragon", in conclusion, is a great piece of fiction that I cannot say enough about, but beware, the ending may be slightly disappointing to some.