Rating: 
Summary: Don't bother making the move.
Review: I was looking forward to meeting Clarice and Hannibal again. Nobody in this book seemed real. I believe Harris was merely writing for gruesome shock value. Don't bother making the movie. Even Anthony Hopkins couldn't save this script. A former Harris fan.
Rating: 
Summary: What's next?
Review: Where will it go from here? Maybe the next book will be titled "Clarice Wakes Up."
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent;if you understand what's beyond the monster
Review: Thomas Harris takes us to an unknow workld where the forbidden becomes exquisite, where the mistery becomes morbid. If you are ready to explore a different world, this is the perfect book. It's written with sophistication and even with an upgraded taste for the macabre.
Rating: 
Summary: too dark for most
Review: I just finished Hannibal and now I see why people are trashing it. It's just too dark for most people. I was mystified by the bad reviews on this site while I was reading the book. Hannibal is scary, intense, exciting and unpredictable in a way most thriller writers can never match. Granted it's not as good as Red Dragon but compared to the competition it stands alone. When I reached the end my first reaction was resistance. I was disturbed in a way that made me uncomfortable and angry. Thats when I realized what all the bad reviews were about. Hannibal suggests things about the human personality that are truly frightening to think about. The question as to whether or not it could happen in "real life" is basically uninteresting. It happens in the book and it is essentially justified within those confines. I recomend this book as a top shelf thriller that you won't be able to put down. When you reach the end and become angry and uncomfortable, remember that this book accomplished it's basic goal better than most of its kind.
Rating:
Summary: It simply is 'not' believable.
Review: Unfortunately, for the readers who have waited years for a second look at the infamous Dr. Lecter, there is only a glimpse in 'HANNIBAL'. The book is well written and keeps your interest, but not with the flare of its predecessor. What was good in 'SILENCE OF THE LAMBS', is now evil, and what was evil, is so still.
Rating:
Summary: This still preys on my mind
Review: A dark, powerful elegy to the loss of innocence, this is a book that appears to have confounded the expectations of those readers that were expecting a clear cut,good vs evil, cat'n'mouse game. Harris delivers, in lets face it mouthwatering prose, a bleak gothic (flawed) masterpiece that I, for one, found unbearably moving. People are complaining that this book 'sells out' Lecter, that it reveals too much of his past, his motivations, the foundations of his, ahem, 'memory palace'. So why were people buying the book, if not for more Lecter? Of course everyone wanted more - a book about Jack Crawford wouldn't be creating such a stir now, would it? But how much more disappointing would it have been if it had been yet another novel about a serial killer, with Lecter dispensing titbits of clues. Sod that. What were people expecting at the end, what scene were they envisaging between these two characters so obviously drawn together? Starling killing Lecter? Vice versa? How much more disappointing would that have been? I found the denouement far more sinister than a gun chase in a basement or a burning house. People's problem with this book is just that it's too different from the norm. It's quite unclassifiable. Obviously there are flaws - the pigs, Clarice's visit to Lecter's cell, but there are also moments of brilliance - the scenes in Florence, in Lecter's homes. In all, it's more in the spirit of Hugo, Bram Stoker or Patrick Suskind's 'Perfume' - bleak, unsettling, baroque and a major sea change. The images of Starling offering Lecter her breast, the butter on her lips, the smashing tea cup, her father's skull are still preying on my mind....Far more so than anything in the previous two novels, which though more tightly plotted, don't carry the same weight.
Rating:
Summary: Lives Upp To All Expectations
Review: All I can say is wow. I haven't been this mesmorized by a book in a long time. The only way to describe this book is to say it is an "experience" and leave it at that. The ending might be a little to shocking to some, but it was great and I can imagine Harris smiling a little while writing it. He has proven himself already to be a terrific writer, but now he has proven himself to be a greater writer that takes risks.
Rating:
Summary: A rather odd departure, but brilliantly told as usual
Review: Like everyone else I awaited this book (7 years!)with such exitement that anti-climax was inevitable. I enjoyed reading it, but felt it was a rather odd departure: surely the most horrifying thing about Lecter was not that he was without a conscience but that he lacked any pathology. As he says in Lambs "You cant reduce me to a set of influences". This is the key to Hannibals mystique: he has somehow chosen to be inhuman. Imagine my surprise therefore, to find this Miltonic Satan weeping over his poor eaten sister Mischa in the same way as the pathetic creatures of the first 2 books in his story. Such is Harris' talent, and such is the enduring appeal of his antihero, that I didnt much mind, like everyone else my main attraction to the books has been the awe and terror invoked by a mind so cold and brilliant, an understanding so sublime and a cruelty so profound. Now look: poor poor Mischa indeed, but worst of all, poor Hannibal. The Doctor would doubtless devise some wicked and precise punishment for my terrible crime. For if Hannibal tries only to eat the "free-range rude", what on earth will he do to the sympathetic?
Rating:
Summary: Hannibal is a man with great taste.
Review: Mr.Harris has done the impossible. Dr.Lecter has joined Michael Corleone as one the Good Guys who happens to be on the wrong side of the law.This book is intense.You are hook the minute you start reading the first paragraph.You will refuse to put it down. I kept wishing that Mr Harris would have been kind and added at least another five hundred pages. This book was well worth the wait. I just wish I had someone to talk to about this absorbing experience I had while reading this book. Visiting Dr. Lecter is a surreal experience that truly changes ones life. Seeing the world from Hannibal Lecter's view is absolutely awesome. Thanks Mr. Harris for giving me a book that I will enjoy reading over and over again.
Rating:
Summary: Stop the Slamming NOW, Read it again if you have to!
Review: This has to be the most amazing piece of horror fiction I have read in quite a while. Not only is the ending amazing, but it is in fact believable given the context of the characters. I believe the people who give this masterpiece one star are those who were looking for "Silence of the Lambs 2." Think about it: more quid pro-quo with Clarice, maybe another killer, yada yada yada. What we get instead, however, is a completely original novel that Stephen King HIMSELF ranks as one of the top two horror novels of our time next to William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. FORGET the one star reviews. Some people just DONT understand this novel for what it is and hate it. Listen to those who know. I even took a college course last year on Horror. Its been at least three years since anything frightened me, either literary or cinematic. Now I can't sleep. This is a book for the ages. Thomas Harris is a genius. Thank God I am not the only one intelligent enough to realize this.
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