Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.
Title: Red Dragon.
Author: Thomas Harris.
Genre: Fiction, crime, mystery, thriller, serial killers.
Country: U.S.
Language: English
Publication Date: 1981.
Summary: A serial killer is on the loose. He bites, maims, and murders entire families in hideous ways. The police have no leads. They're afraid they can't stop the man calling himself Red Dragon. That's why FBI agent Will Graham has come out of retirement. He has a special talent for catching serial murderers, and though the last one, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, nearly killed him, he may be the only one who can help him now. Or he may imperil him instead. Meanwhile, Francis Dolarhyde is Becoming. The Red Dragon is taking over, demanding his due prey. Now, Will has just until the next full moon to prevent another horrible slaughter, and Francis Dolarhyde is surprised to find himself at odds with his inner demon when he meets a woman..
My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:
♥ "Crawford thinks I have a knack for the monsters. It's like a superstition with him."
"Do you believe it?"
Graham watched three pelicans fly in line across the tidal flats. "Molly, an intelligent psychopath-particularly a sadist-is hard to catch for several reasons. First, there's no traceable motive. So you can't go that way. And most of the time you won't have any help from informants. See, there's a lot more stooling than sleuthing behind most arrests, but in a case like this there won't be any informants. He may not even know that he's doing it. So you have to take whatever evidence you have and extrapolate. You try to reconstruct his thinking. You try to find the patterns."
♥ Graham started at the noise, felt a trickle of fear. He was an old hand at fear. He could manage this one. He simply was afraid, and he could go on anyway.
He could see and hear better afraid; he could not speak as concisely, and fear sometimes made him rude. Here, there was nobody left to speak to, there was nobody to offend anymore.
Madness came into this house through that door into this kitchen, moving on size-eleven feet. Sitting in the dark, he sensed madness like a bloodhound sniffs a shirt.
♥ Graham switched on the lights and bloodstains shouted at him from the walls, from the mattress and the floor. The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room full of dark stains drying.
♥ Graham had a lot of trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty. There were no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched everything else he knew. Some of the combinations were hard to live with. But he could not anticipate them, could not block and repress. His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved. His associations came at the speed of light. His value judgements were at the pace of a responsive reading. They could never keep up and direct his thinking.
He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. There was nothing he could do about it.
♥ "Do you know how you caught me, Will?"
"Good-bye, Dr. Lecter. You can leave messages for me at the number on the file." Graham walked away.
"Do you know how you caught me?"
Graham was out of Lecter's sight now, and he walked faster toward the far steel door.
"The reason you caught me is that we're just alike" was the last thing Graham heard as the steel door closed behind him.
He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness. Walking with his head down, speaking to no one, he could hear his blood like a hollow drumming of wings. It seemed a very short distance to the outside. This was only a building; there were only five doors between Lecter and the outside. He had the absurd feeling that Lecter had walked out with him.
♥ A pet funeral, solemn rite of childhood. Parents going back into the house, ashamed to pray. The children looking at one another, discovering new nerves in the place loss pierces. One bows her head, then they all do, the shovel taller than any of them. Afterward a discussion of whether or not the cat is in heaven with God and Jesus, and the children don't shout for a while.
♥ Dolarhyde felt that Lecter knew the unreality of the people who die to help you in these things-understood that they are not flesh, but light and air and color and quick sounds quickly ended when you change them. Like balloons of color bursting. That they are not important for the changing, more important than the lives they scrabble after, pleading.
Dolarhyde bore screams as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone.
Lecter was capable of understanding that blood and breath were only elements undergoing change to fuel his Radiance. Just as the source of light is burning.
He would like to meet Lecter, talk and share with him, rejoice with him in their shared vision, be recognized by him as John the Baptist recognized the One who came after, sit on him as the Dragon sat on 666 in Blake's Revelation series, and film his death as, dying, he melded with the strength of the Dragon.
♥ "It's hard to have anything, isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet."
"Slick as hell."
♥ When you feel strain, keep your mouth shut if you can.
♥ "One thing I've noticed-I'm curious about this: you're never alone in a room with Graham, are you? You're smooth about it, but you're never one-on-one with him. Why's that? Do you think he's psychic, is that it?"
"No. He's an eideteker-he has a remarkable visual memory-but I don't think he's psychic. He wouldn't let Duke test him-that doesn't mean anything, though. He hates to be prodded and poked. So do I."
"But-"
"Will wants to think of this as purely an intellectual exercise, and in the narrow definition of forensics, that's what it is. He's good at that, but there are other people just as good, I imagine."
"Not many," Crawford said.
"What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection," Dr. Bloom said. "He can assume your point of view, or mine-and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It's an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception's a tool that's pointed on both ends."
♥ "...what do you think one of Will's strongest drives is?"
Crawford shook his head.
"It's fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear."
"Because he got hurt?"
"No, not entirely. Fear comes with imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price of imagination."
♥ He watched her in the aisles: Molly, his pretty baseball wife, with her ceaseless vigilance for lumps, her insistence on quarterly medical checkup for him and Willy, her controlled fear of the dark; her hard-bought knowledge that time is luck. She knew the value of their days. She could hold a moment by its stem. She had taught him to relish.
Pachelbel's Canon filled the sun-drowned room where they learned each other and there was the exhilaration too big to hold and even then the fear flickered across him like an osprey's shadow: this is too good to live for long.
♥ "Will you tell the truth now? About Me. My Work. My Becoming. My Art, Mr. Lounds. Is this Art?"
"Art."
The fear in Lounds's face freed Dolarhyde to speak and he could fly on sibilants and fricatives; plosives were his great webbed wings.
"You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much further than you, am insane. I have dared more than you. I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper in the earth, where it will last longer than your dust. Your life to mine is a slug track on stone. A thin silver mucus track in and out of the letters on my monument." The words Dolarhyde had written in his journal swarmed in his now.
"I am the Dragon and you call me insane? My movements are followed and recorded as avidly as those of a mighty guest star. Do you know about the guest star in 1054? Of course not. Your readers follow you like a child follows a slug track with his finger, and in the same tired loops of reason. Back to your shallow skull and potato face as a slug follows his own slime back home.
"Before Me you are a slug in the sun. You are privy to a great Becoming and you recognize nothing. You are an ant in the afterbirth.
"It is your nature to do one thing correctly: before Me you rightly tremble. Fear is not what you owe Me, Lounds, you and the other pismires. You owe Me awe."
♥ Graham put his head down on the table, his cheek on his arm. He could see the print of his forehead, nose, mouth, and chin on the window as the lightning flashed behind it; a face with drops crawling through it down the glass. Eyeless. A face full of rain.
Graham had tried hard to understand the Dragon.
At times, in the breathing silence of the victims' houses, the very spaces the Dragon had moved through tried to speak.
Sometimes Graham felt close to him. A feeling he remembered from other investigations had settled over him in recent days: the taunting sense that he and the Dragon were doing the same things at various times of the day, that there were parallels in the quotidian details of their lives. Somewhere the Dragon was eating, or showering, or sleeping at the same time he did.
Graham tried hard to know him. He tried to see him past the blinding glint of slides and vials, beneath the lines of police reports, tried to see his face through the louvers of print. He tried as hard as he knew how.
But to begin to understand the Dragon, to hear the cold drips in his darkness, to watch the world through his red haze, Graham would have had to see things he could never see, and he would have had to fly through time....
♥ She gripped his upper arm and pulled him down the hall to the bathroom. The light was over the mirror and she had to stand on tiptoe to reach it. She gave him a washcloth, wet and cold.
"Take off your nightshirt and wipe yourself off."
Smell of adhesive tape and the bright sewing scissors clicking. She snipped out a butterfly of tape, stood him on the toilet lid and closed the cut over his eye.
"Now," she said. She held the sewing scissors under his round belly and he felt cold down there.
"Look," she said. She grabbed the back of his head and bent him over to see his little penis lying across the bottom blade of the open scissors. She closed the scissors until they began to pinch him.
"Do you want me to cut it off?"
He tried to look up at her, but she gripped his head. He sobbed and spit fell on his stomach.
"Do you?"
"No, Aayma. No, Aayma."
"I pledge you my word, if you ever make your bed dirty again I'll cut it off. Do you understand?"
"Yehn, Aayma."
"You can find the toilet in the dark and you can sit on it like a good boy. You don't have to stand up. Now go back to bed."
At two A.M. the wind rose, gusting warm out of the southeast, clacking together the branches of the dead apple trees, rustling the leaves of the live ones. The wind drove warm rain against the side of the house where Francis Dolarhyde, forty-two years old, lay sleeping.
He lay on his side sucking his thumb, his hair damp and flat on his forehead and his neck.
Now he awakes. He listens to his breathing in the dark and the tiny clicks of his blinking eyes. His fingers smell faintly of gasoline. His bladder is full.
He feels on the bedside table for the glass containing his teeth.
Dolarhyde always put in his teeth before he rises. Now he walks to the bathroom. He does not turn on the light. He finds the toilet in the dark and sits down on it like a good boy.
♥ Keeping a luncheon table going, pacing the service, managing conversation, batting easy conversational lobs to the strong points of the shy ones, turning the best facets of the bright ones in the light of the other guests' attention is a considerable skill and one now sadly in decline.
♥ He carried the hatchet to Grandmother's room to be sure there were no burglars.
Grandmother was asleep. It was very dark but he knew exactly where she was. If there was a burglar, he would hear him breathing just as he could hear Grandmother breathing. He would know where his neck was just as surely as he knew where Grandmother's neck was. It was just below the breathing.
If there was a burglar, he would come up on him quietly like this. He would raise the hatchet over his head with both hands like this.
Francis stepped on Grandmother's slipper beside the bed. The hatchet swayed in the dizzy dark and pinged against the metal shade of her reading lamp.
Grandmother rolled over and made a wet noise with her mouth. Francis stood still. His arms trembled from the effort of holding up the hatchet. Grandmother began to snore.
The Love Francis felt almost burst him. He crept out of the room. He was frantic to be ready to protect her. He must do something. He did not fear the dark house now, but it was choking him.
He went out the back door and stood in the brilliant night, face upturned, gasping as though he could breathe the light. A tiny disk of moon, distorted on the whites of his rolled-back eyes, rounded as the eyes rolled down and was centered at last in his pupils.
The Love swelled in him unbearably tight and he could not gasp it out. He walked toward the chicken house, hurrying now, the ground cold under his feet, the hatchet bumping cold against his leg, running now before he burst....
♥ Chicago smelled like a spent skyrocket in the hot afternoon.
Graham was lonely, and he knew why; funerals often make us want sex-it's one in the eye for death.
♥ People usually grasped her upper arm, not knowing what else to do. Blind people do not like to have their balance disturbed by a firm hold on their triceps. It is as unpleasant for them as standing on wiggly scales to weigh. Like anyone else, they don't like to be propelled.
He didn't touch her.
♥ She had never seen or touched a cleft lip and had no visual associations with the sound. She wondered if Dolarhyde thought she understood him easily because "blind people hear so much better than we do." That was a common myth. Maybe she should have explained to him that it was not true, that blind people simply pay more attention to what they hear.
There were so many misconceptions about the blind. She wondered if Dolarhyde shared the popular belief that the blind are "purer in spirit" than most people, that they are somehow sanctified by their affliction. She smiled to herself. That one wasn't true either.
♥ "May I touch your face?" said Miss Reba McClane.
He wanted to tell Reba McClane something. He wished she had one inkling of what she had almost done. He wished she had one flash of his Glory. But she could not have that and live. She must live: he had been seen with her and she was too close to home.
He had tried to share with Lecter, and Lecter had betrayed him.
Still, he would like to share. He would like to share with her a little, in a way she could survive.
♥ The question was spoken lightly, very well done, but Reba knew that nobody is ever kidding.
♥ Dear Will,
A brief note of congratulations for the job you did on Mr. Lounds. I admired it enormously. What a cunning boy you are!
Mr. Lounds often offended me with his ignorant drivel, but he did enlighten me on one thing-your confinement in the mental hospital. My inept attorney should have brought that out in court, but never mind.
You know, Will, you worry too much. You'd be so much more comfortable if you relaxed with yourself.
We don't invent our natures, Will; they're issued to us along with our lungs and pancreas and everything else. Why fight it?
I want to help you, Will, and I'd like to start by asking you this: When you were so depressed after you shot Mr. Garrett Jacob Hobbs to death, it wasn't the act that got you down, was it? Really, didn't you feel so bad because killing him felt so good?
Think about it, but don't worry about it. Why shouldn't it feel good? It must feel good to God-He does it all the time, and are we not made in His image?
You may have noticed in the paper yesterday, God dropped a church roof on thirty-four of His worshipers in Texas Wednesday night-just as they were groveling through a hymn. Don't you think that felt good?
Thirty-four. He'd let you have Hobbs.
He got 160 Filipinos in one plane crash last week-He'll let you have measly Hobbs. He won't begrudge you one measly murder. Two now. That's all right.
Watch the papers. God always stays ahead.
Best,
Hannibal Lecter, M.D.
♥ Intense fear comes in waves; the body can't stand it for long at a time. In the heavy calm between the waves, Dolarhyde could think.
♥ He's crazy. All right. That's it: Crazy.
"Crazy" is a fearsome word.
♥ For the first time he saw tears and realized where it ate her.
"Would you excuse us for a minute, officer?" Graham said. He took Reba's hand.
"Look here. There was plenty wrong Dolarhyde, but there's nothing wrong with you. You said he was kind and thoughtful to you. I believe it. That's what you brought out in him. At the end, he couldn't kill you and he couldn't watch you die. People who study this kind of thing say he was trying to stop. Why? Because you helped him. That probably saved some lives. You didn't draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back. Nothing wrong with you, kid. If you let yourself believe there is, you're a sap."
♥ It was like the first time he came to Marathon. He had come aboard Aunt Luna that time too, and often afterward he went to the airfield at dusk to watch her coming in, slow and steady, flaps down, fire flickering out her exhausts and all the passengers safe behind their lighted windows.
The takeoffs were good to watch as well, but when the old airplane made her great arc to the north it left him sad and empty and the air was acrid with good-byes. He learned to watch only the landings and hellos.
♥ Molly was the same height as Graham, five feet ten inches. A level kiss in public carries a pleasant jolt, possibly because level kisses usually are exchanged in bed.
♥ Dear Will,
Here we are, you and I, languishing in our hospitals. You have your pain and I am without my books-the learned Dr. Chilton has seen to that.
We live in a primitive time-don't we, Will?-neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.
I wish you a speedy convalescence and hope you won't be very ugly.
I think of you often.
Hannibal Lecter
♥ He had thought Shiloh haunted, its beauty sinister like flags.
Now, drifting between memory and narcotic sleep, he saw that Shiloh was not sinister; it was indifferent. Beautiful Shiloh could witness anything. Its unforgivable beauty simply underscored the indifference of nature, the Green Machine. The loveliness of Shiloh mocked our plight.
He roused and watched the mindless clock, but he couldn't stop thinking:
In the Green Machine there is no mercy; we make mercy, manufacture it in parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain.
There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us.
Graham knew too well that he contained all the elements to make murder; perhaps mercy too.
He understood murder uncomfortably well, though.
He wondered if, in the great body of humankind, in the minds of men set on civilization, the vicious urges we control in ourselves and the dark instinctive knowledge of those urges function like the crippled virus the body arms against.
He wondered if old, awful urges are the virus that makes vaccine.
Yes, he had been wrong about Shiloh. Shiloh isn't haunted-men are haunted.
Shiloh doesn't care.