Rating: 
Summary: very disappointing
Review: I started reading Harris' books over the summer. It took me 3 months to finish this one. Talk about a boring read! The ending was horrible! What did he do- get bored with writing and decided to come up with a quick fix to end it?
Rating: 
Summary: Could not put it down
Review: Great book until the end. The whole book had great detail, but the ending felt like it was thrown together. Kind of like the ending of King's "IT". A bunch of build up then a fizzle. I finished reading it feeling cheated.
Rating: 
Summary: Clarice the Cannibal?
Review: Not to bore the average readers of these reviews but I can sum up this work in a paragraph or two.Imagine this: You see a nice brochure of a vacation rental in Florida. You pick it up, and immediately are caught up in photos of white sandy beaches and beach front condos. You rush home and plan your trip and count the days until you go. Everything is wonderful, beautiful weather, on-time flights, and even the airline food tastes outstanding. Yet, upon arrival you find nothing more than tents on stilts behind a row of condos blocking your view of the beach. You then realize the picture was taken in front of the condos and you have now been taken! This book is the same as that brochure; true it has it's moments and some of the plot developement has potential, but agent Starling as a Cannibal? Come, come now my dear Mr. Harris, have you had too many juniper berries with your sweet breads? I thoughly enjoyed the first book as well as the movie. Alas, my wait for this book and possible movie has been spoiled!
Rating: 
Summary: Beyond Disturbing, but it does what it's supposed to.
Review: I was both repulsed and horrified by this book. Harris manages to completely destroy the only sympathetic character, which of course was Starling, and by the finale all we are left with is monsters. I have read it once, I am not glad to have read it, and I never intend to read it again. But despite- no, because of all that, the author did what he had intended, to examine the minds of killers and set the moralities we cherish on their ears. Hannibal is not a comfortable read, and I would not reccomend it to anyone with a weak stomach, but in its own way, it is a work of art.
Rating:
Summary: High Expectations Were Not Met!
Review: I couldn't wait for this book to be published! I thoroughly enjoyed all of Thomas Harris's previous novels and I had high expectations for this one. Unfortunately, my expectations were not met. Harris could have done so much with the return of Hannibal - instead he chose to bore us with gruesome details of an implausible story line. And the ending! It was almost offensive - it's as if he took the quickest and shortest route to wrap up the story to meet a deadline. On a positive note, he has a way of bringing the reader into the story with his wonderful landscape descriptions and historical and cultural narratives - they are the only reasons I kept turning the page.
Rating:
Summary: Thomas Harris' Hannibal
Review: Hannibal by Thomas Harris is set mainly in Italy and Mason Verger's home. The book is mostly about Mason Verger, who was one of Lecter's victims. He is now paralyzed yet somewhat alive, and he wants to capture Lecter to get revenge. So he hires various people to try and catch him. At the beginning of the book, Lecter is living in Italy under the alias Dr. Fell, and he flees to Canada after Verger's first attempt fails. The book constantly switches between what is happening with Hannibal Lecter and Mason Verger, with chapters about Clarice Starling in between. I enjoyed this book, but it wasn't as good as I thought it would be. It's a bit slow, unlike its prequel, The Silence of The Lambs, which I read in less than a week, while this took me about a month. The main reason it took me so long is that Harris put a lot of detail in, for instance, almost a whole chapter devoted to describing Pazzi's dead body, and full-page descriptions of buildings, streets, etc, instead of getting to exciting parts faster, as he did in Silence. There should have only been a few chapters on Italy, instead there was a whole 100 page section, in which the only part that caught my attention was the plan to get Lecter, yet once Pazzi gets into the museum where Lecter works, it's obvious that he's going to die. Something else I found annoying was that characters often spoke in Italian, and that kind of lost me as to what they were planning. Yet once you actually get what is going on, the plot is actually very creative. One of the best features of this book is that you learn more about Hannibal Lecter; his childhood and what he's thinking, so you actually end up feeling bad for him during some parts. I especially liked Thomas Harris using a "mind palace" to describe Lecter's mind. However, I think that Starling should have been included more, since she could have made the plot a lot more interesting. I didn't like the very ending, yet the parts very close to it are kind of intriguing, even while they are extremely grotesque. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone with an extremely weak stomach because some of Harris' descriptions are quite vivid.
Rating:
Summary: What a waste of time
Review: I read Silence of the Lambs in a few days, it kept me so enthrallled. HANNIBAL took over a month to finish. I was so uninterested in it I had to force myself to finish it since I had paid for it! The last part of it was so ridiculous. If I had just waited and gotten it at the library I would have taken it back after a third of the pages.
Rating: 
Summary: A book worth savoring!
Review: I really enjoyed this book. The tone is different than its predecessors. I enjoyed thinking about what was going to happen next while I wasn't reading it. Very chilling!
Rating:
Summary: It's as good as it ever could have been
Review: Forget all the hype that surrounds this and its prequels and all the people who expected it to be the best book ever written. This is no masterpiece, but it's a great read, exciting and intelligent. The prose is wonderfully sparse and restrained. The imagery is disturbing. Sure, the ending's like nothing you could have imagined, but what else could Harris have done? Up against the likes of The Bone Collector and Every Dead Thing and even the brilliant Prayers For Rain, Hannibal reads like it is written by THE master of the genre. It's two protagonists are the best characters in contemporary serial killer crime fiction. It reminded me that everyone else writing this kind of stuff is just a pretender to the throne. I hope Mr Harris writes something else before 2005!
Rating:
Summary: Hannibal Is The Man!
Review: It didn't take me long to get pulled into the grasp of Hannibal. I enjoyed Silence Of The Lambs and thought the sequal was worth reading, and I was right on the money. Harris's research and descriptions of his characters is remarkable. The details brought forth scents and feelings of being right there alongside Hannibal. Every word, every sound, every smell was expertly described and worded to give you a taste for this brilliant novel. Any fan of Harris and Hannibal should invest in reading this book...it's a great deal at Amazon that's worth purchasing.
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