**
Seven years after pissing off a high-ranking official at the FBI (The Silence of the Lambs), Clarice Starling is relegated to phone taps and drug busts with no prospects for advancement. Meanwhile, Hannibal Lecter, double-digit murderer and cannibal, is living it up in Italy. Bringing them together again is the function of grotesquely disfigured Mason Verger, one of Lecter's few surviving victims, who is plotting to capture Lecter and torture him for his own amusement. Take the tongue out of Thomas Harris' cheek and this is an unremittingly unpleasant story of ugly people doing ugly things; put it back in, and it's a tale that mocks the very readers who made Harris a bestselling author: that is, it's difficult to understand this book other than as an attempt to answer the question, How much will these fools stand for? Harris goes out of his way to position Lecter as the hero here -- he's like a mobster who only kills other mobsters, one with a strict code of conduct, with Harris at one point going so far as to botch one attempt on him from a woman so that Lecter can later kill a man for the same crime. Slick, but sickening. Made into an equally unpleasant film in 2001.
Seven years after pissing off a high-ranking official at the FBI (The Silence of the Lambs), Clarice Starling is relegated to phone taps and drug busts with no prospects for advancement. Meanwhile, Hannibal Lecter, double-digit murderer and cannibal, is living it up in Italy. Bringing them together again is the function of grotesquely disfigured Mason Verger, one of Lecter's few surviving victims, who is plotting to capture Lecter and torture him for his own amusement. Take the tongue out of Thomas Harris' cheek and this is an unremittingly unpleasant story of ugly people doing ugly things; put it back in, and it's a tale that mocks the very readers who made Harris a bestselling author: that is, it's difficult to understand this book other than as an attempt to answer the question, How much will these fools stand for? Harris goes out of his way to position Lecter as the hero here -- he's like a mobster who only kills other mobsters, one with a strict code of conduct, with Harris at one point going so far as to botch one attempt on him from a woman so that Lecter can later kill a man for the same crime. Slick, but sickening. Made into an equally unpleasant film in 2001.
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