HANNIBAL LECTER

A famed cannibal gets the biography treatment.

It’s been 44 years since Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer with a taste for human flesh, was unleashed on the world, but he’s never far from the public imagination. Consider President Donald Trump’s repeated, seemingly admiring invocations of the murderer during his 2024 campaign, which journalist and author Raftery writes about (with understandable confusion) in the prologue to this book about the killer who first appeared in Thomas Harris’ 1981 novel Red Dragon. Raftery writes that “as modern pop culture menaces go, Lecter’s as recognizable as Harry Potter’s Voldemort, as imitated as Halloween’s Michael Myers, and as quotable as The Social Network’s Mark Zuckerberg.” (Is there a Facebook reaction for “ouch”?) Raftery traces the evolution of Lecter, originally a “shadows-dwelling second banana” in Red Dragon who took the main stage in Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal (1999), and Hannibal Rising (2006). He also looks at the screen adaptations of Harris’ novels, and the actors who portrayed him: most memorably Anthony Hopkins, of course, but also Brian Cox, Gaspard Ulliel, and Mads Mikkelsen. Raftery shows remarkable insight into historical and cultural forces behind Lecter, who, he writes, “had not been invented so much as been summoned up from the country’s bloodstained terrain”—a reference to the rash of American serial killers in the 1970s. Raftery’s book is based on older interviews with people involved in the books and films, as well as new ones, but he was unable to convince the famously media-shy Harris to talk to him. It turns out not to matter—his research is so dogged that the book succeeds anyway. The title of the book cheekily suggests this is a biography, and it is, but it’s more than that: It’s a beautifully written and intelligent work of literary and film history, and an incisive look at American culture writ large.

A fascinating book, perhaps best enjoyed with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.