The Silence of the Lambs

⚖The case for it

Lecter takes up far fewer pages than anybody remembers and dominates the book regardless, controlled and erudite and funnier than he has any business being. Clarice is why it holds up: ambitious and frightened at once, competent without being made bulletproof, which readers in 1988 had not been handed much of. Their conversations are trades, each extracting something from the other, and readers describe getting pulled in against their own judgement. The forensic detail keeps the victims people rather than props. Critics call it a “tour de force of suspense, dark and polished as onyx,” and readers say it “slowly sinks its hooks into you.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Every man Clarice meets is described reacting to her looks and the narration will not let it go, which readers take as the author’s own preoccupation rather than a point about the Bureau: “a hard-on for his female protagonist,” as one puts it, since “every male she meets falls for the heroine.” The commentary on one victim’s weight piles up past characterisation into mockery, reduced by one reader to “SO FAT SO FAT SO FAT UGH DISGUSTING.” Harris reintroduces people by full name long after we know them. Readers who came from the film skim, since knowing the beats drains scenes built for suspense.

— the honest librarian

7h

honest hours

10

sittings