Red Dragon & The Silence of the Lambs (Thomas Harris, 1981 & 1988)

basics...
The Silence of the Lambs is an excellent movie, so I was intrigued as to what the source novel was like. Packaged together in one volume with Red Dragon, the first of Harris' novels to feature Hannibal Lecter and FBI man Jack Crawford, I devoured them one after the other. Dragon sees reluctant, semi-retired profiler Will Graham trying to track the titular killer before he slaughers another family, while Lambs reads like a script to the movie, acting as a fleshed out version of Clarice Starling's hunt for deranged lady-skinner Jame 'Buffalo Bill' Gumb for a reader already familiar with the Oscar winning adaptation.

brilliant...

I enjoyed both books, and both a little differently. Dragon was great as I've never seen either adaptation (Manhunter from 1986 or the 'remake' under the book's name in 2002) and so the story was fresh and unpredictable. Will Graham is a world-weary protagonist and Harris skilfully conveys both his reluctance to get involved in another serial killer hunt (the last, for Lecter, ended with injury) and his driving need to prevent any more murders. It is also interesting that Harris spends a lot of time with the killer, Francis Dolarhyde, giving him motivation, humanity and a sliver of sympathy, while at the same time describing in graphic detail the horrific acts of this sociopath. Lambs was enjoyable because although I knew all of the story beats, Harris' writing kept my interest, and it had sub-plots and nuances missing from the movie, such as Starling's boss, Jack Crawford, who involves Graham in the Red Dragon investigation, who has a much bigger part to play here. His wife is sick and his relationship with Starling is more fully developed, in fact I'm hard pressed to remember the character past the opening scenes of the movie. Throughout both novels, Hannibal Lecter's presence lurks threateningly behind every page but only bursts into the plot at select points, just as he famously only appears for about 15 minutes in the Lambs movie. Lecter is an intriguing character, somewhat of an enigma, and his intelligence and calm offer great fascination, yet I feel that Harris is right to use him as a supporting character. I think that to concentrate on Lecter would be to remove some of the mystique, and for these reasons I do not want to read the sequels, Hannibal or Hannibal Rising, or see the adaptations as I think they would dilute the character and lessen his impact here.

but...
I was a little disappointed in the last act twist in Dragon when the villain seemingly comes back from the dead, it felt like a horror movie cliché.  

briefly...
Chilling and creepy, Dragon and Lambs are an excellent pair of novels that I would be happy to recommend to any horror or crime fan, whether familiar with Lecter and his companions or not.