The Silence of the Lambs

I'm ridiculously excited about Thomas Harris's new novel, "Cari Mora," and so: a few thoughts herein:

*Harris invented Hannibal Lecter--named by Stephen King "the greatest of modern monsters." And who could disagree?

*Harris hasn't released a non-Lecter novel since--approx.--the 1730s, and actually the only non-Lecter Harris work, beyond "Cari Mora," is "Black Sunday," about terrorists hoping to blow up a blimp over the Super Bowl, or something like this. (Weirdly prescient!) In childhood, I dreamed of writing a novel in which good and bad faced off at a baseball game, and the bad guy was outed by tumbling down the "safety net" that protects fans from fly balls. As he fell, the bad guy would lose possession of a scrap of paper, and on that paper you would find all his nefarious secrets. I see now this is a "Black Sunday" rip-off.

*Jodie Foster almost wasn't Clarice. Michelle Pfeiffer could have taken the part, but turned it down, because of excessive creepiness.

*Anthony Hopkins won his Best Lead Actor Oscar despite appearing on-screen for apparently something like eight minutes. "Lambs" is a rare case where one film won Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress at the Oscars.

*Bryan Fuller saw Hannibal for what he was--a metaphor for gay life in America. Homosexual genius Fuller re-envisioned Hannibal himself as a homosexual genius--a creepy outsider, capable of "de-familiarizing" everything, making us see art, clothing, food, and music in new and alarming ways. Finding the ugly in the beautiful and the beautiful in the ugly. In Fuller's capable hands, the Hannibal/Will relationship became a perverse homoerotic romance. Eventually, the two men seemed to die in an embrace. I rarely understood what was happening in Fuller's "Hannibal," but I was mesmerized.

*Harris is indirectly responsible for giving us Gillian Anderson in an icy mask--murmuring about murdering people, while sitting in a beautiful Venetian villa. And so we must all be forever grateful to Harris.

*The new novel is out today. Obsessed! Please enjoy!

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