Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter first entered public consciousness as a supporting character in Thomas Harris's 1981 novel, Red Dragon. When we meet the oddly brilliant homicidal psychopath, he is serving multiple life sentences in a state hospital for the criminally insane. The novel involves the twist of using one serial killer to help catch another, but what elevates it above the general procedural-thriller genre is the deep, unobstructed view it offers into the heart of human evil known as Hannibal Lecter.
Lecter is not simply brilliant; he's also a psychiatrist. He has studied the human mind, knows how to manipulate it, bend it, and twist it to his advantage. He can spot your tells, sense your fears, your darkest secrets, and use them against you.
In the 1988 sequel, The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter graduated from supporting role to center stage and became a household name. Here he functions as a dark god to whom supplicants must pay obeisance.
Throughout both novels Harris confronts us with two species of evil. One belongs to the serial killers, Francis Dolarhyde and Jame Gumb; their evil, though appalling, is all too human, born out of rage and madness. The other evil is, however... something entirely other.
Lecter's evil is a distilled essence, a malevolence of such hideous purity that it seems almost supernatural. It transcends madness. It feeds on pain. When people in the world outside the asylum are faced with a horror they cannot comprehend, they seek insight from Lecter, the font of evil. And he bargains with them-for petty privileges, for a taste of their pain. We watch him through the supplicants' eyes as he sits in his cell and figuratively reaches between the bars to lacerate their minds and hearts with his verbal scalpels.
Gradually you come to understand that he's not quite human. In his eyes, we are nothing - another species, another genus, perhaps - lower life forms to be toyed with and disposed of at his whim. Fortunately we've gained the upper hand: We've bottled this evil... for now.
Lecter's influence over Lambs is pervasive. Each page is goose fleshed with the chill of his presence. The result is unforgettable.
But it gets worse. As if all the foregoing weren't enough, the man is a cannibal. He eats his victims. But not with the vicious rending of the flesh like Jeffrey Dahmer. No, he prepares gourmet meals of various human organs. He brags at one point that he sautéed someone's liver and served it "with fava beans and a big Amarone." (They switched to Chianti in the movie because most people wouldn't recognize Amarone as a heavy red wine.)
As practiced in many primitive tribes, cannibalism was a means of incorporating a fallen enemy's strength into one's self - could be interpreted as an honor, although a dubious one at best. For Lecter, though, it's not simply a matter of culinary preference, but an expression of icy contempt for his victims: We are lambs, swine, and kine to be slaughtered at whim - for simple rudeness or some other seemingly inconsequential offense to his rarified sensibilities.
Why? How? we asked ourselves back in the eighties. What turned this brilliant, cultured, educated man into such a monster?
Thomas Harris offered no answers. For the next eleven years Hannibal Lecter remains an enigma, a malevolent force of nature: He is what he is and he does what he does and that's it.
I admired that. My first bestseller, The Keep, was published the same year as Red Dragon and I'd painted its supernormal antagonist with a similar palette. In the late 80s, when I began adding to the mythos I had created, I took the lesson of Hannibal Lecter to heart: I never explained Rasalom. He too existed almost as a force of nature; he simply was what he was and did what he did.
I know it sounds like heresy, but I wish Harris had left well enough alone and forgotten about Hannibal Lecter after those first two books. I wish he had moved on to something else. Lecter had escaped by the end of Lambs and was out in the world, killing and eating people who offended him. I thought - and still think - that was the perfect place to leave him.
But no. In 1999 Harris published Hannibal in which the eponymous character is pursued by one of his earlier victims, a mundanely evil pedophile named Mason Verger. Even when captured, Lecter is always cool and in control. He manages to thwart all Verger's plans and rescue Clarice Starling in the process. Yes, a wonderful Grand Guignol of a novel, but we're left with the problematic spectacle of...
Hannibal Lecter - superhero.
Sorry...not for me.
It gets worse. The series finished off with a prequel, Hannibal Rising, wherein we're treated to all the horrors and spectacular abuse Li'l Hannibal suffered during his formative years. No wonder he's so screwed up.
No-no-no-no-NO! I deny those last two books! They ruin Lecter for me. They reduce him from a force of preternaturally pure evil to a tawdry, tedious product of childhood abuse.
No-no-no-no-NO! (He repeats) I do not want to understand him! I want him to remain a mystery.
So I've done by best to erase books three and four from memory, but I've taken their lesson to heart: In fiction as well as life, familiarity breeds contempt.
When shaping a character, don't over explain, not even to yourself. Leave your reader with something to think about. The best characters, the ones who linger in memory, are those who retain a subtle air of mystery, where no one knows the whole story. Characters truly come alive when readers are compelled to fill in a few blanks on their own.
That's the lesson of Hannibal Lecter. Now get back to work and put it to use.
-F. Paul Wilson
