Il Monstro

     I've been reading the Hannibal Lecter series by Thomas Harris for a while now; its a horrifying truth. This cannibal is a genius and a murderer. What I get out of it is the way that they describe him. I think one of the biggest themes in the books are what to call Hannibal. He's categorized as a psychopath, but he doesn't seem to show any signs of being one besides killing people. A psychopath is someone who is unstable and very aggressive. Hannibal may be aggressive, but only slightly. He's also very stable, always holding himself up and being the most proper person in the room. I don't think he's a psychopath. I think he's something much worse.

     In The Red Dragon, Will Graham, a FBI investigator, describes him as a monster. The worst form of evil. Hannibal The Cannibal is a perfectly sane person that commits the most evil of crimes. The idea of them asking for his help on cases is bewildering to me. He never truly helps, all he does is make the FBI agents think harder. Sometimes he even makes things worse. No. Hannibal is not to be trifled with. He is actually the most evil that anyone could be, but under all that evil and killing, there lies a lonely man. Family killed when he was young and was force fed his own sister. Some can see why he became what he became. Then he met Will Graham, a man that was chasing after him, and when Hannibal was in jail, sought him out to ask him for help. He fell in love with Will Graham. Then Graham left for good and Clarice Starling came into the doctor's life. Starling was a beginner and Hannibal quickly figured it out. He got her to confide in him the reason why she became an FBI investigator. He fell in love with her too. More so than Graham because he couldn't kill her. Lecter is just an evil lonely man.

     Throughout Harris' books, the main goal is to catch a serial killer with the help of Hannibal because he was caught years ago and is being help in a mental facility. The books go through two stories in each book. One story is about an FBI investigator trying to find the culprit, and the second story is about the killers themselves. This gives the readers an inside scoop on what's going on in the killers' minds, so not only are these books thrilling, they're pretty sad too. The ending of The Silence Of The Lambs was very emotional for me, and that feels weird since the books are thrillers. I like Harris' style of writing because it's not just a plot-based book. It's a book about thinking, literally too because its about psychopaths, though I think that the story is about the idea of evil. We think of evil as this category that is completely a fantasy. When we think of evil, we think of the bad guys in books or movies, but its so real. Anyone is capable of evil, not just the mentally challenged. It can be in a proper man such as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.