Horror Annotation - Hannibal Rising

Author: Thomas Harris

Title: Hannibal Rising

Genre: Crime Fiction, Thriller, Horror, Mystery

Publication Date: December 6, 2006

Number of Pages: 323

Geographical Setting: Lithuania, France

Time Period: World War II/post-WWII

Series: Hannibal Lecter series

Plot Summary: The fourth book published in the Hannibal Lecter series, this book is the first chronologically. It opens in 1941 Lithuanian when Hannibal Lecter is just a child and follows along as he endures the great tragedies that will shape his entire life. As the Germans invade his family first flees, then gets caught in the crossfire, and everyone except for Hannibal and his younger sister Mischa are killed. When a band of looters find them, Mischa is lost as well. Hannibal barely escapes with his life. Later he is found in an orphanage by his uncle and taken back to France. There he grows up, under the care of his aunt-by-marriage and struggles to recover his missing memories of what really happened to his sister. By the time he is grown he has gained both a medical education and the memory of the looters killing and eating his sister. What follows is a tense and grizzly road of revenge.

Subject Headings: 

World War II

Violence

Revenge

Cannibalism

Child Abuse/Trauma

Family Death

Murder

Appeal:

Intricately plotted/plot driven

Fast paced

Disturbing, Menacing,Gritty

Dramatic/Suspenseful

Similar Authors and Works:

The remaining 3 Hannibal Lecter books: Red Dragon, Hannibal, and The Silence of the Lambs.

Along Came a Spider - James Patterson

• Washington, D.C., police detective Alex Cross becomes caught up in a kidnapping case that may involve Gary Soneji, a teacher at an elite private school who is also a schizophrenic psychopath and serial murderer.

Box 21 - Anders Roslund

• Sold into sex slavery in their pursuit of better lives in Sweden, Lithuanian girls Lydia and Alena learn of a chance to secure their freedom and take revenge on their enslavers.

Every Bitter Thing - Leighton Gage

• The son of the Foreign Minister of Venezuela is found dead in his apartment in Brasilia. Due to the political nature of the crime, Chief Inspector Mario Silva of Brazil's Federal Police is called in to investigate. As he delves deeper into the murder, he discovers that a chain of murders have occurred throughout Brazil, all with the same MO: victims are first shot in the stomach, then brutally beaten to death, and, even more puzzling, they were all passengers on TAB flight 8101 from Miami to Säao Paulo. What sinister motive connects these killings? And why does it appear one passenger on that flight, a fifteen-year-old boy who was later raped and killed in prison, is at the heart of it all?

Other notes:This book was not nearly as good as I wanted it to be. When I looked into the history of the book and read that the author wrote it only because he either had to write it or the movie studio would give his iconic series to someone else to finish without his input... it became a lot more understandable. The origin story of Hannibal Lecter should have been so much more than this, or it should have been left shrouded in mystery for all time. Because the character of Hannibal Lecter is so much of a god-modded Mary Sue I honestly don't see how this story could have been told better. Also, while this book is listed as fast-paced I found it seemed to drag on. Any quickness came from time skips, or unbelievably shortened timelines. This book also wasn't really scary or horrific. The majority of the creepiness came from Lecter's (and Inspector Popil's) weird obsession with Lecter's Aunt, not the murders, dead bodies, gore, or cannibalism. The only real redeeming factor I found was the look at the daily life in post-WWII France. Most history books jump straight from "the end of the war" to "The 50's" and this book has an interesting look into what it was like, in Europe, as people picked up the pieces.

Booktalk - How to Survive a Horror Movie

Have you ever seen a horror movie? Have you ever wanted to jump into the movie screen and smack the main character upside the head? Have you ever been alone in the house at night and thought you saw a hooded man standing outside your window? Then this book is probably for you.

In this practical self-help book you will be bombarded on every page with useful, life saving advice such as:

• Did your car break down in a corn field at night? Is no one else around? You walk home. You do not ask for directions.You do not walk toward that light in the distance. You stay on the road, dummy. You stay on the road!
• Are you having a late at night out with friends? Is everyone drunk? Has someone in a polo shirt and/or miniskirt just suggested you all go break into an abandoned building? You go home! You go home right now, sleep it off, and tomorrow? You get some new friends! All those other guys are dead.
• Has an old man just tottered up to you and started telling you that an item on your person is cursed? Don't you laugh at him. Don't you call him an old fool. You nuke that item from SPACE! Also, give that man a tip. He just saved your life.

Additional chapters include an in-depth test to find out if you are currently living in the Terror-verse. It even gives you the tools you will need to pin down the exact genre, movie budget, and time period of horror you are living in.

A goofy look at the themes, memes, and tropes of the horror genre this books is a great read for fans, a great resource for writers, and just plain fun for everyone else.

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Article response: As for the statement that we should only booktalk books we have read and loved, I have a couple of different issues with that. After all, there are plenty of times when not having read the book wouldn't be too much of any issue (e.g. at the beginning of a summer reading program/book club/class or study.) I think there are also books  that you can describe quite accurately and clearly without having read them. Many non-fiction books could be well represented even if you have only read a summary, a review or two, and/or skimmed the book in part. In a lot of ways non-fiction books are more pigeon hole capable than many fiction books. However, as someone who mostly reads non-fiction for assignments and schoolwork and not for fun I could easily be wrong on that front.

Kirkus Review - Steelheart

Steelheart, Brandon Sanderson

A classic coming-of-age thrill ride as teenage David faces off with the super villain who killed his father. This is as close to a comic book as you can come without pictures.

What would happen if humanity began to develop super powers? What would happen if those powers did nothing but corrupt? If there were only super villains and no super heroes? These are the questions Sanderson asks in his latest book, Steelheart. When Steelheart, one of the strongest of these villains, called Epics, takes over the city of Chicago, David's father is caught in the crossfire. Years later, David is, almost, all grown up and Steelheart's reign over Chicago is absolute. So what is a boy to do but track down the Reckoners, the Epic-killing underground, and convince them to let him join. What follows is a fast paced romp through gun fights, explosions, infiltrations, and high speed chases. People get shot, secrets get revealed, stress and drama abound.This book started in shock and blood and the promise of a great story to come and it ends the same way. Steelheart doesn't just set up for a sequel, it basically begs for one.

This book is a departure from the steampunk fantasy of Sanderson's other major works, but he stays true to his action, adventure, and thrilling plots. Complex, fun, and just a little tongue-in-cheek, this is definitely a must-read across genres, genders, and ages.

Week 5 Prompt

When looking at the two different sets of reviews in the resource folder, my first reaction is disgust at the Book Review Digest reviews. I mean, if I’m going to be reading something that long, I might as well just read the book itself. And the reviewers themselves come though and kind of pompous to me. However, one of the questions was whether, having read the reviews, I would purchase the reviewed book for my library, which makes a difference. Because when I look for book reivews, I’m doing it because I might want to read that book and I want to know what real, live, actual people thought of the book. Not people with inflated opinions of their own opinions passing judgment on books as a career. 

My BA was in English: Creative Writing, and boy can I tell you that everyone who thinks they know something about literature likes to pass judgment on books as if they were the final word on the matter. And having also read those same books for that same class, my opinion was usually vastly different than the opinions of the people who spoke the loudest and longest in that classroom. Me and the other four silent ones who sat against the wall, the ones who turned in our assignments with proper grammar and punctuation and page length, generally had similar opinions. But then, if we didn’t, it was pretty clear to us all that it was more a matter of taste and individual pet peeves than the actual quality of the book in question.

I guess all I’m saying is that, in my experience, the people who talk the loudest about books are the ones who subscribe to the idea that “I didn’t like it, therefore it must be a bad book.” Which I understand isn’t true of all professional book critics, but that is my bias coming into this situation. It is also pretty obvious that the Amazon reviews are even more open to bias and overarching generalizations. They aren’t exactly the most reliable thing on the planet. But they are usually honest. 

And not only are they honest, but you go read the reviews on a popular book, or even a regular book with a couple of dozen reviews on it and you can find the truth in there. You just have to look for trends. You have to translate and realize that the teenager with the lack of punctuation and the one star rating who is complaining that the book is boring and dull, and the well balanced 4 star rating that goes on for several paragraphs and mentions that it wasn’t a book she had to stay up late at night to finish but it was pretty good... well, they are both talking about the pacing. The book is slow. It doesn’t grab you and hold your attention with every word.

I would also point out that readers read and readers write about what they read. That’s why books get so many reviews on Amazon and why the website goodreads.com exists at all. So when I’m trying to figure out what to buy for my library that people will want to read, especially with fiction, I would consider both of these sites to be valuable sources of information. A book with 4 glowing reviews might have a perfect 5 star rating, but a book that has been out for a month and has over a hundred reviews might only have a 3.5. But a lot more people are reading that second book. And a majority of them liked it, even if it isn’t the vast majority. That means something to me. 

All that being said, in a professional setting, I think I would find the Book Review Digest type reviews a lot more useful than I do now. After all, the whole “I might as well just read the book” is a snappy comeback but in reality I don’t have the time to read that book, and the next book, and all of the other books that were published just in this month alone. That kind of long, but comparatively short, and usefully in depth look at a book could easily be very helpful to me as a librarian. Even if they do sound kind of pretentious.

On a totally different note, the whole e-book vs print book drama is just one of those ways where reality and he-way-it-has-been-done haven’t caught up with the technology. And you can hardly blame them considering how fast this new technology (computers in general, not just e-books) has come upon us and how slow, historically, human society adapts to new things. Do I think it’s right for e-books, or even self-published books if you want to get into that, to be treated as second class citizens in the review world? Not really. A book is a book, no matter what format. But that mostly just means that the people who put out e-books need to start thinking about a different form of marketing. After all, their product is designed and aimed at the computer user. The person with the tablet or the kindle or the smartphone. And with a little creativity, there are tons of ways to get that book out in front of the public. 

Because that’s all book reviews are. Marketing. In a lot of cases, free marketing. They are about someone using a public platform (e.g. a newspaper, magazine, blog, etc) to tell people “Hey! This book is pretty awesome. But that one kind of sucks!” So while I don’t think major publications should exclude books based on format, I also don’t think that authors and publishers of e-books have much room to whine about it. You get the book ready for the public eye, then you format it and put it on sale. The public downloads it. I’m sure there’s a bit more to it, but I know an e-book doesn’t require printing, reprinting, blinding, packing, shipping, shelving, storing, etc. Take some of the man hours you would have spent on that and market that book instead of just complaining that the old version of marketing isn’t being nice to you and your product. As far as I know, no one is banning e-books. They just aren’t reviewing them.

RA - Secret Shopper

My library card happens to be good at several of the local county and township libraries so I picked one that I had never been to before and went in to do my Secret Shopper. That was when I hit my first issue. Where do I ask my Reader Advisory question? I had planned to go to either the Reference Desk, or possibly a Fiction Desk if they had one. But apparently what this library has done, likely to reduce staffing needs and streamline customer service, is get rid of all of the specific desks. Instead they just had one main desk at the entrance that was billed as both the Info Desk and Check-out Desk.

At first I avoided the desk. I didn't want to dump the trickiness of an RA question on the, likely, part-time non-librarian who was on duty behind it. However, after some searching , I realized that my choices were either her, or one of the pages who were shelving books and at least the girl at the desk had access to a computer to help her.

So I went back to the desk and talked to, let's call her "Patty" to protect the innocent. Not that there's much protecting to be done. Yes, Patty was a part-time employee with no real training in RA and no idea that things like NoveList existed, but bless her heart, she tried her best.

Honestly, she asked all of the right questions. What had I just finished reading? What did I usually like to read? What did I like about those books? And we got to a good summary of what I was looking for. Character driven fantasy novels with a lot of suspense. The problem came in when we tried to take that summary and translate it into a book I hadn't read yet. As I said, Patty didn't know about NoveList, or any similar resources, and without going outside of my role as Secret Shopper I couldn't suggest them to her. So we ended up looking up some of my favorite authors and found a collaborative series between one of them and an author I'd never read before. They had several books in that series and I was sent off to find them. I haven't read them yet, but I skimmed the first few pages and it does seem worth reading, even if it isn't exactly the kind of thing I normally read.

(I did go back after I got the books and chatted with Patty. It was kind of fun going through their databases and finding the ones that work similarly to NoveList and helping her figure out how to use them. I think she was more excited than I was. But overall it was an interesting experience.)