American Gothic: The Beautiful Nightmare World of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter Books

[Contains spoilers.]

Twisted and unforgettable, Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels have been drawing readers into their gothic dreamscape over the course of over forty years and multiple adaptations. From Michael Mann's Manhunter to Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, the good doctor has menaced generations of viewers from the safety of both big and small screens. Come along on a deep dive into what these books have to say about evil, outsiders, power, American society–and hunger.

Harris’s Writing Style

In the preface to the 2000 edition of the Red Dragon novel, Harris talks about his characters–especially his most chilling creation–as if they are real people and he is merely recording their actions. He writes, “I dreaded doing Hannibal, dreaded the personal wear and tear, dreaded the choices I would have to watch, feared for Starling. In the end I let them go, as you must let characters go….There is a certain amount of courtesy involved.” 

Thomas Harris started out as a journalist covering a crime beat, and his writing has a blunt, matter-of-fact quality even when he’s describing such baroque horrors as a man being served his own brain. There’s also a real sense of the meticulous forensic work that goes into solving crimes, alongside the usual leaps of intuition of the serial killer genre. Clearly a lot of research went into everything from forensics to film processing. The resulting sense of depth and texture grounds the books in a believable reality.

But then, the devil is in the details. It’s the bizarre flourishes that make these books fever-dream vivid and memorable. Strange touches like the faceless Hannibal villain Mason Verger drinking martinis infused with orphan tears and calling the risen Jesus “the Riz” make these books weirdly delightful. (Emphasis on the weird.)

Eat or Be Eaten

Themes of consumption are, unsurprisingly, very prominent throughout these novels. In Red Dragon, the killer Francis Dolarhyde consumes a William Blake painting to give his dark altar ego life. Hannibal Lecter, of course, consumes those he considers to be beneath him. His former victim Mason Verger plans to feed him to hogs. Then there’s the dog-eat-dog world of law enforcement that wears Clarice Starling down and consumes Will Graham. 

Scholar Peter Messant has analyzed Harris’s novels as works of gothic fiction, in which appetites that are usually repressed find their expression in shocking ways. He finds that cannibalism represents “the worst aspects of western culture” (451). Hannibal Lecter is the dark mirror that shows the society that imprisons him its own image. Like an empire built on colonialism and relentless capitalist expansion, he consumes without remorse.

Corruption Arcs

Given the less than flattering portrait Harris paints of late 20th century America, it’s not surprising that the overall arc of the novels is a tragic one (for everyone but Hannibal, anyway). The heroic but troubled Will Graham winds up living alone in Florida after his wife and stepson leave him, an alcoholic, his face mutilated after his fight with the Dragon. Among fellow FBI agents, he has become a cautionary tale by the time Clarice finds herself about to graduate from the academy.

Clarice Starling is hailed as a hero after singlehandedly taking down Buffalo Bill, but her star begins to wane after a while. After she takes the fall for an operation gone wrong, she faces professional disgrace and sexual harassment after having clawed her way to the top in a male-dominated field. She hopes to redeem herself by catching Hannibal, but ultimately the devil she knows seduces her away from the upstanding morality she embodied.

SEE: Themes of Voyeurism

Hungry gazes are all over Thomas Harris’s oeuvre, from the mirrored eyes of the Red Dragon’s victims to the eyes Hannibal says Clarice Starling feels “moving over [her] every day” (209). The unfortunate tabloid journalist Freddy Lounds meets his end at the hands of Francis Dolarhyde for the crime of feeding the public’s desire for lurid spectacle, but not before the Dragon shows him his transformation on film, demanding, “do you see?” (RD 115).

Videos and film strips are a recurring motif in the series, most notably when Francis Dolarhyde, who works at a film processing facility, films himself killing families as the Red Dragon. Recorded images make an appearance in The Silence of the Lambs book as well, when the killer Jame Gumb watches old home movies of his beauty queen mother. Likewise in Hannibal, the good doctor presents a lecture with a slideshow on the motif of Judas hanging in art, which he later uses to torture the Italian policeman Inspector Pazzi who’s discovered his secret identity.

Going back to Freddy Lounds, his character in particular is used as an indictment of tabloid journalism that titillates rather than informs the public. As a former crime reporter himself, Harris likely had an ax to grind with Lounds’s brand of sleazy, unethical reporting. Clarice notes in Silence that Hannibal Lecter is “catnip to the media,” and when she interviews him Lounds’s former rag the National Tattler refers to her as the “BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN!!” (59). Throughout the series, Harris uses the Tattler to comment on the role of tabloid journalism in bringing serial killers a dubious brand of fame–and the reading public that eats it up.

Hannibal Lecter as Outsider

Harris’s good doctor is positioned as an outsider in American society in almost every possible way. Apart from the obvious (he’s a criminally insane murderer who eats people), Hannibal Lecter is about as far from your average Joe as it’s possible to be. He’s a wealthy Eastern European count with refined tastes and a seemingly endless reserve of knowledge about art, literature, psychology and, of course, anatomy. Harris endows him with strange physical traits such as maroon eyes and six fingers on one of his hands. He’s described as slender and slight, yet he has immense physical strength. He is also so relentlessly queer coded that Justice Department sleazebag Paul Krendler remarks in Hannibal that he “always figured him for a queer.”

Quoting an essay by MaryKate Messimer, Stephanie A. Graves notes that Hannibal is “sleek, cultured, charming … intellectual, and artistic” and that these are all deeply queer-coded characteristics in the context of American pop culture, as seen in the influential 1990s documentary The Celluloid Closet (51). 

Another important mark of Hannibal’s queerness is the fact that he defies classification. We are told that “there’s no word for what he is” in Silence, and in Red Dragon, Will Graham remarks that “[t]hey don’t know what to call him” (54). He destabilizes the boundaries between sane and insane, human and other. He is ultimately an outlier: a “monster” (54).

Hannibal’s relentless joie de vivre also sets him apart from the decidedly grim and serious characters he typically interacts with. Often, he’s the only person in the book who seems to be having any fun. It’s this gleeful quality that makes him such a fascinating villain. While some bad guys are motivated by vengeance or compulsion, Dr. Lecter is in it purely for the love of the game. 

It’s worth noting that he also embodies a lot of vampire tropes, further setting him apart from the crowd and underscoring his monstrous nature. With his sleek, dark hair and tailored appearance, he cuts a figure similar to Bela Lugosi in the famous 1930s Universal Dracula films. Like Count Dracula, he’s a member of old European nobility with a predatory hunger–after all, cannibalism isn’t that far removed from having a taste for blood. His sense of smell is practically superhuman, and his ability to get inside the minds of others almost feels like a vampire’s flair for spellbinding. After their first meeting, Clarice feels “suddenly empty, as though she had given blood” (21).

American Darkness

Harris’s America is one of ineffectual institutions, rank opportunists, and lonely landscapes, where every oasis of calm and security (the households of the Dragon’s victims, the blind film technician Reba’s cozy home, even Harris’s “little house…like a boat at sea” (from the Forward to the 2000 edition of Red Dragon) is surrounded by darkness.

Petty fiefdoms and corrupt institutions crop up in the Lecterverse a lot. The smug Dr. Chilton runs the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane as a temple to his own ego. The FBI in the books is more concerned with politicking and keeping up appearances than with helping dedicated agents like Clarice Starling, Will Graham, and Jack Crawford (particularly by the time Hannibal rolls around). As Daniel O’Brien notes, “the U.S. law enforcement system is a bear pit of naked ambition, power-plays, jealousy, resentment and vindictiveness” (5). In the same book, Mason Verger’s wealth and political influence allow him to operate outside the bounds of human morality, essentially becoming a Bond villain.

There is also a recurring theme of livestock being raised for slaughter. For instance, The Silence of the Lambs gets its title from an incident in Clarice’s childhood when she tried to rescue a horse from the slaughterhouse after her rancher relative took her in following the death of her father. From that point on, she dedicates herself to making the “lambs stop screaming” (211), that is, to protecting the innocent. 

Hannibal antagonist Mason Verger is the heir to a meatpacking fortune, whose wealth comes from the killing of pigs. It’s also frequently remarked upon that Hannibal sees his victims as pigs fit for slaughter, the “free-range rude” from whose number he selects his menus. 

Haves and have-nots; butchers and swine; dragons and the “ant[s] in the afterbirth” (RD 225) who witness their becoming. Harris’s books are populated with the remorseless and the hapless, and the rare law enforcement officers tasked with keeping the darkness at bay. Of course, this is partly a function of the genre they occupy–these are horror thrillers about serial killers, after all. Still, the bleak vision Harris presents feels all too resonant in our era of monsters who are more mundane than Hannibal Lecter, but no less dangerous.

Light and darkness are everywhere in these books, and there tends to be a whole lot more of the latter. (For instance, Clarice Starling’s name signals her alignment with goodness and moral clarity, as well as indicating a certain coldness in her: it evokes the words “clear,” “ice,” and “star.”) In fact, Harris’s novels maintain a general pessimism about the problem of evil, particularly in a society whose institutions so often fail the most vulnerable. 

When Clarice–a walking symbol of goodness and righteousness–fails in her mission to apprehend Hannibal and joins forces with him instead, it’s a clear indication that evil has triumphed. The book that marks the end of the series (at least chronologically) is an unflinching vision of horror.

God’s Country

“I collect church collapses,” Hannibal tells Clarice in one of their tete-a-tetes in Silence. “Did you see the recent one in Sicily? … Was that evil? If so, who did it? If He’s up there, He just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans–it all comes from the same place” (19). He maintains that his own minor depredations pale beside those of the Almighty. His idiosyncratic view of God–that he exists, perhaps, but as a force of evil–informs his worldview and sheds light on why he does what he does. 

Conversely, the predatory, ludicrously over-the-top villain Mason Verger is defined by his overt religiosity. When he prods Clarice about her religious leanings, she maintains that she was raised Lutheran, but her current stance toward religion seems to be ambivalent at best. Like Hannibal, she was orphaned at a young age and experienced a foundational trauma that challenged her notion of a benevolent God.

In Silence, Dr. Chilton also torments Hannibal by forcing him to listen to a televangelism channel at full volume. This is just one more instance of organized religion being linked with the forces of hypocrisy and–at least in the good doctor’s view–bad taste. Hannibal exists in opposition to the prevailing American protestantism of his Baltimore home. In fact, he’s often portrayed as a satanic figure who tempts the righteous and toys with those around him for his own amusement.

Hannibal quotes the Bible in a letter to Clarice he sends in Hannibal: “Did you ever think, Clarice, why the Philistines don’t understand you? It’s because you are the answer to Samson’s riddle. You are the honey in the lion.” Samson’s riddle goes: “Out of the eater came something to eat, and out of the strong came something sweet,” referring to bees making honey in the carcass of a lion. In addition to commenting on the strength and sweetness of Clarice’s character, it also ties into the themes of consumption that run throughout the series. In his typically demonic fashion, Hannibal twists scripture for his own ends.

A Matter of Taste: Camp in the Lecterverse

These books have a notable ongoing fascination with the concept of taste. Clarice in particular, who Hannibal admits possesses “a little taste” (20) in their first meeting, often makes note of things she considers to be tacky or kitsch. She shares Hannibal’s penchant for sleek, powerful cars and beautiful clothes, and in Hannibal, she’s able to locate him hiding out in Florence by “following his taste.” 

Like him, she is ambiguously queer coded, eschewing heteronormative relationships with men apart from the occasional casual fling like she had with the entomologist Pilcher at the end of Silence. When we catch up with Clarice in Hannibal, she is thirty-three years old (the same age Jesus Christ was when he was crucified, Hannibal helpfully reminds her), still living with her friend from the FBI academy Ardelia Mapp. This coding serves to mark her as an outsider, further aligning her with Hannibal. Also like him, she has a detached, analytical perspective, “intent as a lizard” (Silence 194). After a drug bust gone wrong, she is on the outs with her superiors, demoted to sifting through evidence in a basement room with a sign marked “Hannibal’s House.”

Clarice’s fall from grace and subsequent punishment begin a slide toward disillusionment with the Bureau that ultimately leads her into Hannibal’s arms. In a climactic moment, their shared sense of taste becomes literal, as Clarice accepts an offered bite of the boorish Krendler’s sautéed gray matter. 

This is, of course, a wild and outlandish conclusion to a book that contains, among other things, a vengeful millionaire training pigs to tear his nemesis Hannibal Lecter apart. Clarice becoming the bride of the monster certainly angered and baffled a lot of readers, and whether or not you buy the corruption arc Harris is selling, its delirious campiness is hard to deny.

Susan Sontag famously wrote that “the hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance” (7), and this more-is-more sensibility is all over Harris’s novels, none more so than Hannibal. With its far-flung locales, deep dives into Hannibal’s bizarre “mind palace,” and operatically gory flourishes, there’s no denying the book is fun, whether or not you can stomach (sorry) the jaw-dropping ending.

Harris’s characters might have an obsession with good taste, but these books definitely don’t share it. They’re filled to the brim with gothic excess, lurid imaginings, and dialogue so crass it could’ve been written by a 4chan-addled eighth grader. These novels thrive in the fertile ground where “high” art meets pulp fiction; they are spectacles showcasing the darkest of human hungers–in increasingly campy ways. If you agree with Sontag that “Camp is the glorification of ‘character,’” (8) then Hannibal, as the book where Harris’s most famous creation fully takes over the narrative, is the most effective at doing “something extraordinary” (7).

Hannibal Lecter the Antihero

By the third book in the series, Dr. Lecter had ceased to be a malevolent enigma haunting the margins of stories about other characters. Here, he strikes out on his own 

as a co-protagonist (along with Clarice) of his own horrific globetrotting adventure. 

Hannibal’s evolution from unknowable horror to a figure you can root for (however reservedly) speaks to a need to domesticate what scares us. In Silence, he tells Clarice, “Nothing happened to me … I happened” (19), but in Hannibal he is given a backstory that explains his compulsions and renders them less frightening as a result. In 1944, when he was six years old, his younger sister Mischa was cannibalized by German deserters fleeing the collapsing Eastern Front. The addition of this foundational trauma seems to, in the doctor’s own words, have “given up good and evil for behaviorism” (19). Instead of remaining an unknowable evil, Hannibal is rendered just another tragic antihero. Before, Hannibal was an unfathomable menace, a kind of force of nature. The backstory that was intended to humanize him instead renders him frustratingly banal. 

His story is further expanded in the prequel novel Hannibal Rising, a fairly uninspired potboiler about the young Hannibal taking revenge on the men who ate his sister. To his credit, Harris was reluctant to delve that deep into his creation’s murky origins, only writing the book because the studio that owned the screen rights to his work threatened to make a young Hannibal movie with or without his involvement.

While this tortured backstory might demystify the character too much for some fans, it had the effect of making Hannibal, if not sympathetic, at least explicable. Instead of an eldritch horror, he became just another serial killer with a tragic past, a monster you could carry around in your pocket. When the book came out, Annie Gottlieb mused in The Nation that it was “Harris’s little revenge on a public and an entertainment industry that have clamored ‘More Hannibal Lecter!’”

Conclusion

Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels are the product of a very specific time and place. Early ‘80s America was fascinated with the idea of serial killers after high-profile cases like those of the Zodiac Killer and the Son of Sam. The public was hungry for an exploration of this particular brand of evil, and Harris used psychology and forensics to craft unforgettable heroes and monsters, helping to popularize a new thriller genre in the process.

In crafting the saga of Dr. Lecter, Harris also created a portrait of the society his creation preyed upon. Through the eyes of point-of-view characters Clarice Starling and Will Graham, we see the nation’s hypocrisy, sexism, and ravenous appetite for bloody spectacle. Hannibal represents, in Harris’s words, “the adversary for anything like kindness and hope … he’s the dark side of the world” (O’Brien 3). The fact that Clarice is wooed over to the dark side is a testament to the seductive power of evil–and an indictment of the system she was sworn to serve.

Like the cannibal who slowly consumes them, these books are hypnotic, horrific, often wildly funny, and full of deadly allure. In Harris’s world of beauty and horror, good and evil are secondary to the dictates of taste, and “taste isn’t kind” (Silence 20). In the exaggerated funhouse mirror of late 20th-century America they present, the familiar becomes strange, and we can see, like Clarice, we’re “not in Kansas anymore” (48).

Works Cited

Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998.

Thomas Harris, Red Dragon. New York: Berkley, 2009.

Annie Gottlieb, “Free-Range Rude,” The Nation, July 1, 1999.

Stephanie A. Graves, “A breach of individual separateness”: Multivalent

Queerness in Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal. Studies in Popular Culture 42.2 (2020): 46-65.

Rebecca Janicker, Review of Dissecting Hannibal Lecter: Essays on the Novels of Thomas Harris. Journal of American Studies 44.2 (2010): 450-51.

Daniel O’Brien, “Forward,” in Dissecting Hannibal Lecter: Essays on the Novels of Thomas Harris, Benjamin Szumskyj, ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 1964.