Hannibal Rising

Perfect background novel that answers many of the questions concerning the creation of Hannibal Lecter, serial killer.


Thomas Harris, a former crime reporter created a fascinating and highly complex character in Hannibal Lecter. Beginning with Red Dragon, we were given a fascinating glimpse of a truly formidable, highly organized serial killer.

And.. with Silence of the Lambs, we watched the unfolding of this monsters convoluted mind and peculiar frame of ethics. It was due to my curiousity about how such an intelligent and sensitive man came to be what he was, that led to my buying Hannibal Rising.

I wasn’t disappointed, because this book finally filled in the missing pieces of the puzzle. The tale begins with Hannibal meandering through the carefully constructed rooms of his mind. There is music there if he wishes it, and these rooms store the compendious knowledge he holds. But, outside these rooms, there are places of chilling terror and darkness. It is outside the safety of his museum of the mind, that Hannibal realizes he must explore, so as to be fully cognizant of what he is.

There are 4 protagonists in the book, including Hannibal himself. His baby sister Mischa, Lady Murasaki, his uncles’ wife, and a French detective-Inspector Popil. Mischa looms large, a constant thread throughout the book. Though dead to the world, she is very alive in a young traumatized Hannibal.

Rescued from appalling conditions by his uncle: Count Lecter, Hannibal is taken to France to live in his uncle’s chateau. Both Count Lecter and his lovely complex wife, Lady Murasaki, understand the young lad and try and support him in growing away from his past.

Here all of the young boy’s passion for art, fine foods and great literature begin to bloom. At the same time, memories of little Mischa and what happened to her begin to push young Lecter into acts of appalling atrocity. The first homicide occurs when Hannibal is still a juvenile, and attracts notice of Inspector Popil. A man of secrets himself, he senses what the young boy is and wants him locked away. Yet he feels a deep and profound empathy for what the boy underwent in his early years.


Thomas Harris did an excellent job of filling in most, if not all of the blanks so many of us wanted to see filled, in this book. There are scenes of appalling barbarity, a testament to man’s inhumanity towards others, and in the carefully calculated murders Hannibal commits.

It left me wondering. Who are the real monsters? The men in jackboots murdering innocents in the name of a political ideology and greed? Or a young traumatized boy who killed only for justice?