Did Thomas Harris stop giving a shit when he wrote "Hannibal"?

[chocolatebargalileo]

How do you go from writing The Silence of the Lambs to Hannibal?

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

It's all the mark of someone trying to retroactively shoehorn lore into a Macguffin (the serial killer profiler) and make him a Main Character when Lecter was really something between an antagonist and a Deus Ex Machina Who Knew The Answer All Along.

Had SOTL not been such a huge success, we could have had a series of books where Hannibal becomes a muse to a variety of law enforcement schmucks in sequential serial killer chases. (The TV series went down this route a little bit I think)

Clarice Starling was just too good of a character and Harris fell in love with her, and maybe couldn't let either of them go after the movie(s) was so huge, so I also think Harris might have been strong-armed into a Starling/Lector shipping fic.

Mind you I thought it was hilarious that when the Hannibal TV Series showrunners couldn't get the rights to Clarice Starling they just went "fuck it" and made Will Graham (the Red Dragon FBI agent) the focus of Hannibal's weirdo sexual fantasies instead.

 

[Arthur Morgan]

I know for Hannibal Rising, he didn't want to write a prequel, but the movie studio who owned the property basically threatened him with "Either you write it or we will" and that's why that was a pile of shit. I think Hannibal might have been a similar thing, a sequel to Silence was bandied about by the studio and he decided to do it himself. He was probably also getting tired of being pestered about what happened to Hannibal after Silence.

 

[lIllllIiiiiLLLLiiiiIIIIll]

I like the blind girl in Red Dragon not seeing the horrifying shit inches away from her. I also like when that guy eats his own brain. Mason Verger is also a pretty classic character. Monster inside and out. Great character foil to Lecter himself.

So basically I guess I'm saying the series just went into general psychological body horror and that's okay with me.

 

[dreamworks face]

It's a significant drop in quality - Harris was essentially writing fanfiction of his own franchise, and I suspect he was deliberately trying to get paid, as the Silence of the Lambs movie came out in 1991 and the Hannibal book came out in 1999.

 

[Jewthulhu]

I couldn't get past the beginning of Hannibal. It felt like reading bad fanfiction.

 

[DoomsdayElite]

It wasn't as good as Silence, but the ending was the worst part of it. It was a slap in the face. I didn't even bother with Hannibal Rising.

 

[William Murderface]

Hannibal was such a poor ending. Starling ends up as Hannibal's girlfriend, drugged at first, but later willing. He had to have done it just for the paycheck.

 

[draggs]

There's some good characters in Hannibal. The prose itself is pretty good. But there's also a lot of stuff like Harris not knowing how to wrap up the story of characters like Barney so we get "Margot gives him his money and he gets to go around the world seeing Vermeers." Because we learned that Barney wanted to go around the world and see all the Vermeer paintings. BUT HE DIDN'T GET TO SEE ONE BECAUSE HANNIBAL WAS DERE!

The over the top nihilism grinds the reader down. The attraction of Lecter as a character is the contrasts. He's completely evil and boring in Hannibal. Mason Verger is an extreme pervert sadist so he's supposed to be worse, but we see multiple instances where Hannibal is just as cruel and clearly enjoying it. There's no more illusion that the cultured, elegant side of Hannibal means anything except as another demonstration of his superiority to everyone and everything. Jack Crawford dies entirely alone and entirely defeated because muh nihilism. Ardelia's outrage and grief at losing Clarice is just another thing ground down into nothing by the uncaring universe because muh nihilism. It don't matter none a this matters

Kidnapping Clarice and drugging her and trying to brainwash her into Mischa is not the Hannibal of Silence. That Hannibal never would have tried that shit with that purpose. His character is now contradictory. He's supposed to be completely different from normal human beings and other sociopaths, but why he's a sociopath ends up being just another muh childhood trauma. His fantasy about brainwashing Clarice into Mischa while he has her blitzed out of her skull on a double handful of extremely exotic drugs, and actually trying to do it, is something that should be beneath Hannibal Lecter. Lecter doesn't think psychiatry is a science, but his education in psychiatry guides his thinking of how to brainwash Clarice. His ability to attract the ladies is very well-established, but only Clarice hits his Mischa button. For some reason. Which is never established. He just likes her because she's kinda sorta Mischa because she is, okay? And she can cure his pain because she is. And she does. To wrap up nihilism fest 1999 we get a happy ending for him and her. Hannibal Lecter was supposed to be beyond that shit. But he isn't. Shut up and enjoy the expertly sauteed Krendler brains

tldr giving Hannibal a kinda mundane backstory and lazily developed motivation in his relationship with the protagonist, setting him free only to use him as merely another nihilism hammer to beat the reader's head in with - in a novel that has almost nothing but nihilism hammer characters - and topping it off with Hannibal and Clarice living happily ever after is very fanfic and very disappointing