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Outstanding
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The Independent Mark Timlin
Hannibal Rising is spot on. It's a superb work of blood and violence where the horrors of war are beautifully, if that's the right word, described, as Hannibal is forced into becoming the cannibal that will later be his trademark.
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Favorable
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The Observer Peter Guttridge
Often chilling, sometimes ludicrous but always entertaining.
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Mixed
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Washington Post Douglas E. Winter
With his origins told, however, Hannibal Lecter and his creator must consider the fate of too many monsters, real and imagined: The more we know about them, the less fearsome they become.
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Mixed
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Los Angeles Times Dale Bailey
One senses Harris straining toward a theme here: Hannibal's inhumanity reflects the inhumanity all around him. Hannibal, the book suggests, is us. Except he isn't, of course — I've never eaten a human cheek roasted with morels, and I'm betting you haven't either.
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Mixed
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Boston Globe Chuck Leddy
While Harris has explained, in gripping detail, Hannibal Lecter's mysterious origins, perhaps Lecter is a more frightening character in "Silence of the Lambs," where his childhood traumas, his dark closet of memories remained tightly shut.
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Unfavorable
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Houston Chronicle John Freeman
With each Hannibal novel, Harris' prose feels more and more like a screenplay between two covers. The police-procedural detail that made 1981's "Red Dragon" so sticky has melted away, leaving behind snappy dialogue, cartoonish characters and a penchant for sentence fragments.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Book Review Terrence Rafferty
Although this isn't a terrible novel, it never feels like a necessary one: what it most resembles is a deluxe collection of deleted scenes on a special-edition DVD.
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Unfavorable
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The Onion A.V. Club Tasha Robinson
That foreknowledge of Lecter's adult character makes the book largely unsatisfying; its only twist is a minor one portrayed as a major one, and otherwise, it follows a simple, straight line through Lecter's life, suggesting a series of check marks—oh, here's where he first ate human flesh; ah, that's why he has such sophisticated taste.
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Unfavorable
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The Guardian Steven Poole
But though there are still individual sentences and paragraphs to recall Harris's past mastery, the extremely short chapters are telling. Mere sequence, as of a film composed entirely of brief scenes, has replaced rhythm and suspense.
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Unfavorable
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The Independent Boyd Tonkin
Harris is no Dostoyevsky, and this novel ranks as one more superior shocker rather than an incisive dissection of the psychopathic mind. He gives you the sinews of horror, not its soul, and this book accounts for the modus operandi of the "monster" we already know.
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Terrible
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Sydney Morning Herald Peter Craven
The first third or so of Hannibal Rising is so dully put together, with such a mishmash of barely distinguishable characters and sloppily articulated incidents, that the mind can barely concentrate for all the turns the stomach is expected to perform.
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Terrible
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The New Yorker Anthony Lane
The failure of Hannibal Rising, which seems to me absolute, is easily explained. It stems from the author’s newfound conviction that Hannibal, too, can be easily explained.
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Terrible
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The New York Times Janet Maslin
Does that motivation sound primitive? It shouldn’t. It is no more crude than the revenge plot that drives Hannibal Rising or the market forces that impelled Mr. Harris to cough up this hairball of a story.
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Terrible
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Entertainment Weekly Tina Jordan
The violence, though stunning, is so poorly described it doesn't frighten.
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Terrible
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The Spectator Philip Hensher
It's one of the grosser stupidities of this almost limitlessly stupid novel to think that those readers who have enjoyed the grand guignol of Thomas Harris's other Lecter novels, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal would welcome an account, even an explanation of his hero's habits.
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