I just finished it yesterday and I enjoyed it very much. I wanted to read it before the movie came out. There's still about a 25 year gap of Hannibal Lecter's life after this and before Red Dragon. Hopefully Harris will write another one. Anybody else read this one yet?
i'm currently reading it. i wasn't intrested in it after Hannibal being not so good but Rising is okay so far. though nothing could beat the first 2 books. those were awesome.
okay, just finished it and it was better than i thought it would be... one question though ***SPOILERS maybe*** he got arrested for the murders so when his murders in america happened( right before red dragon) during the case wouldn't they have noticed that he has killed a bunch of people? since he was involved in his own case wouldn't he have popped up as a red flag? idk... ***END SPOILERS*** JOn
I actually wondered the same exact thing. The explanation I came up to justify it to myself was that he was never actually charged with anything in Europe and also maybe the communication between US authorities and European authorities wasn't that great. I also never read the Red Dragon book (I plan to read that one next) but ony saw the movie. I also believe there is about a 25 year gap between the end of Rising and the begining of Dragon so maybe Harris will come out with another book to fill this gap and maybe explain some of this.
also I dont believe that Lecter was ever a suspect in Red Dragon untill he was actually caught so there would be no reason to look into his past. I'm just coming up with some possible reasons and may be wrong about this.
well red dragon starts just after lecters arrest... but yeah that is a good point about european and US communications... so i don't know... JOn
Unfortunately I was thoroughly disappointed with this book. It's not a patch on either Red Dragon, or Silence of the Lambs. Having read Hannibal, T.Harris's previous book, I sensed that the writer had grown weary of this whole franchise. At least Hannibal had its own sense of sardonic humor, coupled with tongue-in-cheek violence. The problem with Hannibal Rising is that the violence has become tedious and the whole plot of the book is linear and predictable from the very beginning. The story line is a cop-out, as if theauthor doesn't know what to write next, and is just putting pen on paper, and relying on the die-hard fans to feed him. Whereas Thomas Harris recreated the psychological thriller genre, he has degenerated with age into a pulp fiction writer. What is the point of this book? Are we supposed to justify Hannibal's psychotic behavior, because of his wretched past? Is it a tragedy about a brilliant mind that could have benefitted this world, but instead chose to tread a wayward path? If so, I would have liked to have seen more of what conditioned that mind, and how it thought, rather than the irrelevant snipets of pretentious information that can easily be found on the internet. My biggest hate of this book is whereas the first two books were genuinely scary and disturbing, this one has degenerated into a 70s Modesty Blaise/Emmanuelle porn-snuff movie. Harris would be better off laying Hannibal to rest and trying something new... knitting perhaps.
