#sotl book

[cringeworms]

Happy Valentine’s Day aka the anniversary of The Silence of the Lambs! Here’s a quick sketch of our favorite fbi trainee :]

[agathah]

Happy Halloween!

This is inspired by that one part of Silence of The Lambs (book)

[onai88]

I wanted to do a study and bruh i wanted to draw Clarice as a child ( her hair is blonde bcs of light okay 😭) with her favourite horse Hannah so here it is ig

[rethomida]

[hugh-lauries-bald-spot]

clannibal 🤝 hannigram

love is using the last of your strength to pull the knife out of your chest and stab them in the heart

[bowie-boy]

We watched The Silence of the Lambs in one of my classes today and acquaintances kept coming up to me and asking me if I’d seen the movie before.

[god-of-whatever]

Hannibal fans

Is this a typo/mistake or was it intentional?

Just saw it for the first time

"Dr lector" uhhh?

Silence of the Lambs

arrow books copy page 270

-

Edit: I checked some ebook copies, Im sure it's just a typo now.

[could-they-be-a-pro-wrestler]

How successful would Clarice Starling…

Would you like to submit a character? Click this link if you do!

[anticanonhearts]

Clarice Starling Playlist!

for plight-driven gals with good bags and cheap shoes

[heartyearning]

@the3gracesshownattheirbath (don't think it's letting me tag you properly, soz!) basically what i use now is just a simple moleskine notebook in which i write down the title, author and date i finished the book, then a short summary in my own words (sometimes i forego this esp if it's a re-read) and jot down my thoughts on it, any quotes i liked from the book, whatever the lead-up to my reading it may have been etc. i also use it sometimes when i'm reading a play or smth for school, not always but on occasion just to make notes as i'm going through the text. i also compile little poems i like in there but i haven't done much of that this year!

it's taken on different forms since i've been doing this though, in my first official reading journal i also noted down DNF's or book acquisitions and sometimes made notes on audiobooks i was listening to, but i've found none of that really interests me so i ended up just simplifying it down to this which works lovely for me :)

[somekindofhannibalcannibal]

i will be reviewing and assigning a numerical rating all of the books in thomas harris' "hannibal lecter" series just to get my thoughts out there. this is a once in a lifetime event you can't miss it

red dragon: the first and best to do it. easily my favorite of the quartet. i’m sure everyone knows by now that despite often being advertised as the first ever appearance of iconic character hannibal lecter he doesn’t actually appear all that much in this one, and i don’t know if it’s my unavoidable pop cultural knowledge that makes his presence feel greater than it is here, but i definitely get why harris felt the urge to bring him back. at the same time it’s really interesting to see how his characterization noticeably differs from later installments, and how harris was probably seeing him as more of a mundane serial killer figure than the force of personality he would become. but speaking of the more prominent characters; i think the book version of will graham is a much more compelling protagonist than he’s given credit for. i feel like a lot of people think the show made him interesting but imo he’s already plenty interesting here. i really really love that he’s a protagonist in a crime thriller procedural novel who experienced a significant trauma related to his job some time back and is being called back for one more case…and while most stories in this genre would have him get over his past issues and heroically face down the killer at the climax, this book really emphasizes how much the act of killing another person will fuck you up. yes, even if you absolutely have to do it. the fact that it ends so bittersweetly (and that description is an optimistic interpretation) instead of a standard “the day is saved, hooray” really makes this book stand out. book will is just so much more compelling to me than the standard main character type in this kind of story even today, and while i of course am into his show counterpart’s arc of trying to reconcile his own urges towards darkness, i think the book version’s relationship with violence and what the book says about the act of killing is so important to the themes. if more crime thriller procedural novels were like this i would probably read a lot more of them. the amount of page time devoted to the killer’s point of view also feels unique - it’s a level of depth and humanization that villains in these kinds of stories rarely get, to the point that francis dolarhyde is arguably the novel’s second protagonist. some of his backstory is a little cliche at this point, like most of his issues being traced back to a single abusive parental figure, but a lot more interesting than the usual page-long motive rant you get at the end of these things. it’s clear this was written at a time when criminal psychology was really heating up in the popular consciousness and people would have been interested in exploring the subject in fiction. harris really knocked it out of the park with this one and i’d urge everyone who’s only seen the show and/or movies to read it. i give it 5 out of 5 dragons 🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲

the silence of the lambs: unfortunately, despite having a lot of the same strengths as its predecessor, you can’t recommend this book without a ton of caveats. for all its good points - and there are indeed many - the transphobia at the center of the novel’s plot just looms over everything else and it’s impossible to talk about it without discussing how that affects things. part of the problem may be that in contrast to the first book, we get next to nothing from the killer’s point of view and it really feels like harris found this character too much of an insane freak to be worth sympathizing with. but it’s also because this book devotes more time to its actual protagonist’s backstory and characterization, and those parts are great - clarice starling is a very well-done character who is shaped by her background much more than will (who we know comparatively very little about), so we get to delve into her story more, which enhances the narrative as we get to know her. i really like her singular focus on saving lives and her sense of identification with the victims, whether found dead or going missing, and how the book goes into detail on how her background informs that. we also get an increased role for hannibal, who really establishes his personality as we know it in his pov scenes. it’s not surprising audiences found his dynamic with clarice so intriguing; it’s definitely the most interesting to me in this context, full of ambiguities and unspoken admiration for each other that never goes beyond the separation of the prison walls. it ends a lot more straightforwardly happy than red dragon, but with a new, younger protagonist who’s already been through a lot, it feels a little more earned than it could have. (i still don't buy her romance with pilcher, though. the movie made the right choice in leaving that out and having her be unimpressed with his attempts at flirting over a murder investigation.) it’s just…the transphobia. possibly made worse by the novel’s multiple attempts to justify or excuse this portrayal, which just make the book even more uncomfortable to read. (also honestly sucks how many people to this day believe those excuses and will insist “it’s okay because the author said the character isn’t REALLY trans!” whenever they discuss the book or film. you can like something and acknowledge that it’s “problematic”, i thought we’ve been over this.) aside from that it’s mostly good. i give it 4 out of 5 screaming lambs 🐑🐑🐑🐑

hannibal: this one’s complicated. i definitely get why people think it should never have been written in the first place, and why they think hannibal as a character doesn’t work outside of his original context as a side character influencing things from inside a cell, and i’m also not sure i buy harris’ claims in the author’s note that he just felt like he had to revisit these characters one last time, no other reason…but i don’t think the book is totally awful. it’s more of a mixed bag than anything. don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty i didn’t like at all - most people focus on the ending, which i agree doesn’t work or feel properly built up to. i might have been more accepting of it if it didn’t feel so much like it was rushing to a conclusion after spending so much of the rest of its length (i think this is the longest book in the series?) on other things. but there’s other problems too. my biggest beef with it is how relatively little clarice really gets to do over the course of it, despite being such an iconic active protagonist in the previous book. the inciting incident of her storyline is another case of the book getting really uncomfortable to read in ways the author probably didn’t intend - i know this series has always been “copaganda” on some level in how it portrays the fbi as basically good and necessary and heroic, but this takes it to another level by showing clarice becoming disillusioned with the fbi because…well, they’re actually prosecuting her for an action that the media is portraying as another instance of racist police brutality, for SOME reason. i’ve ranted about this before but it’s not good and leaves a bad taste in your mouth for the rest of the novel. we’re a long way from “killing someone, even if you have to do it…is the ugliest thing in the world”, and i don’t like it much. this is also the point at which hannibal is pretty much a mary sue in the purest definition - he’s good at everything, never gets caught, smarter and more capable than almost everyone around him, and basically everything he does is justified somehow. it gets pretty ridiculous by the end.

that said…there’s also a surprising amount that i liked in this one. the sequences with hannibal in florence are probably the best in the book, and whenever we’re in hannibal’s pov the narration really indulges in lush descriptions and poetic prose that’s actually very lovely to read. whatever his real motives for writing this, i do think harris enjoyed the process. on the other side of the pond, mason verger is an absurdly over-the-top villain for us to hate and feel no remorse when he’s inevitably killed, but there’s something kind of fun about the almost campy excesses this book gets up to in its more lurid moments. i also really like margot as a character, even if the narration gets kind of weird about her sometimes, and although she's obviously written by a cishet man in 1999 i do think harris might have been sincerely trying to offer some better representation of queer characters this time around. (i also like show margot as her own character, but…we really should have been harder on the show for making her so acceptably, conventionally feminine. ah well) when i was first reading the books i went looking for older posts about them from people who weren’t focused on the show, trying to gauge if this one was worth reading at all. one account i looked through really didn’t like how clarice was written in it (and they were pretty much the only one talking at all about the ~problematic parts at the beginning of the book, and not just discoursing about the ending), but they did like the rest of it and suggested that this book might have been better if clarice wasn’t in it at all and hannibal was the only recurring character. and honestly…i kind of agree. leave clarice alone if this is what you’re going to do with her. hannibal is already the protagonist of this book and the italy plot with pazzi + the plot with the vergers is plenty of story for the rest. margot is the secondary protagonist in my heart. my thoughts on this book could be their own post at this point but yeah, mixed feelings. not sure i'd recommend it freely but i wouldn't write it off as just bad. i give it 3.5 out of 5 brutal moray eels 🐍🐍🐍.5 (there’s no eel emoji)

hannibal rising: the last and least. yeah this one’s not good. it’s rumored this was only written because dino de laurentiis threatened to have someone else do it and if that’s true…you can tell. it’s the shortest book in the series and harris was clearly trying to get the minimum requirement written to get this over with and be free of hannibal lecter forever. at least that’s how it felt. anyway i didn’t totally hate this one - i actually thought the first half of the book was pretty good for what it was, expanding on an already kind of dumb backstory detail established in the previous book but also creating what felt like a pretty believable portrait of a young hannibal, growing up in a house of nobility, preternaturally intelligent from a young age, having his life torn out from under him by an intense traumatic experience, and rebuilding himself years later into a cunning and dangerous man. however the book really falls apart when it gets to the revenge plot portion of the story, which is just not interesting or enjoyable to read about at all. it’s just him tracking down and killing a group of generic interchangeable bad guys who lack any redeeming qualities or even the entertaining aspects of a mason verger. where this book really fails is as the start of darkness for its main character that it’s billed as. it just doesn’t feel like a villain origin story when every person the villain kills is an irredeemable monster; when exactly does this righteous vengeance-fueled kid become The hannibal lecter, who casually murders anyone who bothers or bores him? lady murasaki’s “what is left in you to love?” line falls flat when he hasn’t even killed any innocent people yet. i’m not even going to touch on the weird pseudo-romance plot between him and his aunt. honestly the book could stand to be a little weirder. it’s like. i hate to say this but it’s like one of those live-action disney movies that purport to tell the story of one of their classic villains but are really just about au versions of those villains who are actually good. 

well whatever. at least it’s still well-written on the level of its prose, even if it was under duress, and even though most people believe this book shouldn’t exist because hannibal is one of those characters who shouldn’t have any backstory (it does ruin the impact of the “nothing happened to me, i happened” line when there’s a whole book reducing him to a series of influences), it does give us at least something to go on when writing about his past for fanfic purposes. would be interested to see how the show would have handled this. i give it 2.5 out of 5 horses pulling chains to squish a man against a tree (extra half point for legit memorable imagery that inspired one of the show's best dream sequences) 🐎🐎.5

stay tuned for when i review the movie adaptations in similar fashion. 

[cringeworms]

My favorite Christmas present this year: a nearly mint condition first edition copy of The Silence of the Lambs!!!

A lovely new addition to my Hannibal shelf 🥹

[penicillinsteve]

The fact that every actress to play Clarice has been 5'3 is weirdly delightful to me. Assigned five apples tall by casting.

[onai88]

That one part in the book where Ardelia helps Clarice to study.

[rethomida]

I still can’t get over this masterpiece. If someone would ask me to name my favourite things from the adaptation, Lecter’s art works would be in the top 3 list !

[macncheems]

coming OUT as a lesbian clarice starling truther❤️🧡🤍💗💜 i really really like this movie it pulled me out of art block somehow