I’ve seen the movie Silence of the Lambs many times, and the movie Manhunter once, but haven’t previously read any work by Thomas Harris. Manhunter is based on Harris’s third novel Red Dragon which was more recently re-made into a film of the same name starring Ed Norton.

I’m now listening to the audiobook of Red Dragon and I’m pretty impressed with it. Harris’s style is simple, kind of terse and unornamented, more of a gritty detective story than a horror story in terms of feel, but there are these incredibly hard-hitting and awful scenes of horror interspersed throughout. The horror feels real, though, not supernatural or make-believe. I haven’t enjoyed a new fiction author discovery as much since Robert Charles Wilson a few years ago, and I look forward to reading Harris’s later books, though I’ve heard Hannibal is not quite as good and Hannibal Rising is fairly questionable. OK, let’s just say I’m looking forward to finishing this one up, and then reading Silence of the Lambs.

Just recently finished Queen of Angels by Greg Bear and found it a challenging, thought-provoking piece of science fiction, quite different in style from the other Greg Bear works I’ve read. Though definitely a science fiction story, this one feels more literary and sort of poetic than his other stuff, though maybe closest to Blood Music. An interesting story focusing on distortions of the mind, and questions of consciousness and soul, both human and artificial. I’ll probably want to pick this up again in a year or two and go through it once more, as it’s fairly thick with ideas.