Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris

Yes! A thousand times, yes! This is the book that The Sculptor wanted to be. It had absolutely everything the other book didn’t: Great procedural drama, three-dimensional characters, a sympathetic villain. It restored my faith in inhumanity after a mind-blowingly quick read.

Let me explain that last bit: I’m a notoriously slow reader, and it usually takes me about a week to finish a book, even one that I love. I completed this one in three days. Part of it was to get back on track to be ahead in my work, but I couldn’t have done it if it weren’t such a compelling read.

First, let’s clear the air about something: Hannibal Lecter makes an appearance in this book, but if you’re looking for a Silence of the Lambs level of participation, let me manage your expectations. He’s not really important to the story. He’s a plot device that could easily have been replaced with any other character. In fact, he’s not really fleshed out as the character he would later become. But that does not mean this book isn’t compelling or even wonderful. It’s a great read. And here’s why…

The psycho in this story is Francis Dolarhyde. Which is an unfortunate name for somebody with a speech impediment stemming from a cleft palate. Because he grew up in the ‘40s and ‘50s, this wasn’t something that was easily correctable at the time and he fell victim to being an unwanted child and ridiculed orphan. He was raised by his abusive grandmother who got her jollies by threatening to cut off his “little buddy.” Harris does a great job of setting Dolarhyde up as an unremorseful monster, and later breaks him down into a sympathetic antagonist. I love stories that do this. There’s nothing more rewarding when reading a book as rooting for both the antagonist and protagonist. Like most psychos in literature, his trigger is the emotional abuse he received as a child. We are introduced to him after the killings, but are given enough background about his life and his love of The Great Red Dragon paintings by William Blake. The reader grows with Dolarhyde as he struggles with his own transformation. He both fights it and embraces as he begins to fall for a blind film technician. It’s a less literal transformation as Buffalo Bill’s in Silence of the Lambs, but the theme exists across all of Thomas’ works.

Our protagonist, Will Graham, is a tortured, yet believably brilliant FBI special investigator (His gut isn’t a superhero, like in The Sculptor). He’s not an agent, as his past won’t allow him to be, but he’s invaluable to the FBI as a criminal profiler. He really knows how to get into the heads of the psychos (starting to see why he’s not an agent?). He’s not a psycho himself, but really empathic to their thought processes. But he’s built a life away from the Bureau, one that he’s happy in. They suck him back in to hunt the “Tooth Fairy,” (aka, Francis Dolarhyde, aka The Red Dragon). But what will he sacrifice? His happy life with his wife and stepson? His life? Both? The conflict built up regarding Will Graham’s marriage is nearly as well-written and engaging as his conflict with the Red Dragon.

Since 1975, Thomas Harris has only written six novels, five of which contain the Hannibal Lecter character. I say that, because reading this book and the others, as I have over the years, you get the sense that Thomas doesn’t necessarily relish in the story telling. He seems as tortured as Will Graham, reluctantly returning to the word processor because he’s encouraged to do so. That may or not be true, but like Graham, Harris is a genius in his field and I don’t think a larger bibliography would add anything to his mark on the art of popular fiction.

Thus, I read this book because it was assigned

The Sculptor

I spent more time on this in MS Paint and PowerPoint
than Greg Funaro spent on characterization and plot.

Gregory Funaro

I remember growing up with the old generic packaging of cheaper versions of brand name products. It was usually a plain yellow box or container that just said what was in it in black, boxy lettering. Like, CEREAL, or JUICE, or PREGNANCY TEST. Greg Funaro’s matter-of-factly written novel, The Sculptor, could have easily had a big yellow cover that simply said, ‘BOOK.’

It wasn’t a bad book, and it wasn’t a good book. It simply exists. From a trite premise (which I know I’ve seen before in one form or another—only the MO has changed) to a cookie-cutter love story, this book just was.

I normally enjoy thrillers that have a procedural feel to them (i.e., Silence of the Lambs or even stuff written by Kathy Reichs or Dan Brown), but this book dropped all of the stuff that makes those books great. It abandons good detective work for amazing intuition. It was as if Sam Markham’s gut was a better FBI special agent than he was. Give that gut a badge, is what I say. There are characters that don’t really belong, such as Sam’s partner. She ends up being the only one who does any real detective work, but is relegated to off-page work that is only referenced. What got me was, I read the first 30 pages and thought for sure I was getting a Thomas Harris-esque read, but beyond those pages Funaro gave up on trying to build an FBI world I cared about. Even the epilogue seemed to be there only because Funaro thought his book had to have that ending. It was an ending I expected through the entire book.

In fact, I didn’t care about any of the characters. They were such simple caricatures of other writers’ work, that I felt like I’d been there before. He tried to develop his main protagonist, “the pretty Asian art historian,” into some sort of romance novel heroine (She’s beautiful, smart, strong and flawed! I swear, there’s a flaw in there somewhere!). But there wasn’t really a flaw. She was too perfect. As was Sam, the English-teacher-turned-FBI-superstar!

Funaro’s writing is clean and clear, which worked to this book’s advantage, because the plot and narrative were also clean and clear. There were no great similes or metaphors, no flowery prose or complex themes. Even the antagonist seemed to meet all the stereotypical criteria for being a psycho. It’s given to us like the ingredients on the back of a (generic) cereal box: physically abusive mother-30% DV; sexually abusive mother-40% DV; murderous trigger-20% DV.

Aside from being as formulaic as Bisquick Shake n Pour, the dialogue was about awful—but also very plain. It’s as if Funaro (who, per the back cover, is an associate professor in the School of Theatre and Dance at East Carolina University) has never heard people speak. I’m hard-pressed to think of one person who uses the word “thus,” let alone a whole cadre of people who use it out loud in daily conversation. Is it his theatre background that causes him to use it? Or just a desire to be so correct that he does so at the expense of realistic dialogue?

I really wanted to like the book, but I never thought I’d read something that I was so indifferent about. If I weren’t reading this for class, I don’t think I would have finished it. Not because it was terrible, but because I’d have forgotten I was reading it.

The Church of Dead Girls, or "Stephen Dobyns Opens a Phone Book and Tells Us About Everybody In It. And, Oh Yeah, One of Them is a Murdering Pscho" by Stephen Dobyns

The Church of Dead Girls is, quite possibly, the most painful read I’ve had in quite some time. I really wanted this semester to be the one where I don’t bash a book, especially one written by such a prolific author.

I’ll start with the cast of characters. It’s a mighty list and Dobyns exhaustively goes into detail about just about everybody in the town. Where they grew up, when they moved away, when they moved back, what they were like as a kid, who dated who, and what each of their houses is like. It’s a list that’s designed to say that anybody is a suspect, keep your eye on them. Because there are so many characters, and the identity of the killer isn’t exposed until about twenty pages from the end, trying to play along and sort out the clues is akin to guessing how many gumballs are in a fishbowl… there's no possible way of actually knowing, so you just throw out a random number and maybe you’re right. So I’ll say that when I found out who the killer was, I just didn’t care. I was just glad it was over.

Red herrings. There were more red herrings in this book than at a communist fish market. There were characters and events that only served to muddy the waters, and it wasn’t even in a fun way. We’re told at the beginning of the book from our narrator (I’ll get to that guy in a minute) that everything is connected, but the connections are forced. They’re more implied than actual, and only served to give Dobyns an opportunity to set up a soap box and wax philosophical about small towns and the human condition.

Our narrator, who I don’t believe we’re ever given a name for—egad how frustrating it was to go on a 400+ page adventure with somebody who didn’t even tell us his name—seemed to know everything about everything that occurred, and for somebody who claimed to be a private person he sure as hell must have talked to everybody in town to get the level of detail he achieved. There were some details he never bothered to attribute, and were of such an intimate nature the question of how he knew about them begged to be asked. Let me re-iterate: He never told me his name. It’s like picking up a hitch hiker, listening to him tell a 12 hour story about a bunch of people he knew, but never finding out his name. That’s a key part to any relationship, and I just dedicated a week of my life to this guy. I’ve never had a one-night stand, but I believe this is the literary equivalent, and I hated it.

Dobyns' mastery of the past perfect tense is awe-inspiring… and downright annoying. There was a “had” in almost every sentence. I was counting on one page and when I got the tenth sentence, there was a double “had.” A “had had” right there. I actually took extra-strength Excedrin to get through the rest of the chapter.

The book opened with a description of a crime scene, and it was a pretty good. I felt optimistic about the story. But that’s the problem when you start a story in present tense, and then go 400 pages of past perfect, it gets muddled down by phrasing. The psycho seemed almost cartoonish, a caricature of what a psycho should be. Maybe it’s because we found out more about the bartender’s motives in life than we did our antagonist, but he was such a paper-thin character throughout the book, that there wasn’t a whole lot to go back on and say, “yup, shoulda seen that coming.” He was a peripheral character who seemed like a normal enough fellow. I know, I know, that’s the point, right? Dobyns hit us over the head with his “you don’t really know the person next to you” sermons, and BAM! there it is.

I’m sure this book has its fans, but I’m not one of them. Call me uneducated or obtuse, but this book left me angry at the end. Not because of the ending, but because the whole thing was such an epic time-suck. It is unnecessarily long in my opinion, but others may argue that the deep characterization of the townfolk is imperative to the story. That our narrator tells us so much about them and yet, we know very little about them and the people in our own lives.

It would make me think harder about that message if the delivery wasn’t so flawed.

What I did enjoy about this book was the absurd response the town had to the disappearance of three young girls. From roving bands of vigilantes to paranoid finger-pointing, the hysterics grow with each abduction until it teeters on all-out mayhem. It was fun to watch people grow ignorant from fear. And it seemed especially poignant in this day and age.