Hannibal Rising

this book tells the childhood and early adulthood of Hannibal Lecter.


I read this book for the reading rush, for the prompt “read a book that inspired a movie you have already seen”. So I already so the movie, one of my favorite of the whole Lecter saga. And I must say that the movie is quite accurate to the book.

This is not an easy book to read even if it is not horrible either. The beginning is harsh for little Hannibal and I can't deny I felt pity for him. To me the whole plot made sense with the rest of the story of Hannibal. But it was rather long, a good 60% to 70% the story doesn't really go forward and thankfully I saw the movie before because otherwise it would have been really boring to me. With that the writing style is really detached and cold to asserts the emotional death of Hannibal so it's kind of boring in the beginning.
Other than that I found the characters well developed and the writing easy to go through.

What still bothers me is the police inspectors description of Hannibal as a monster. Does it make you a monster when you want to kill the people that ate his sister or for the way he behaves after seeing his family die and the people he cares about? Not that I think he's a good person either, but he doesn't enjoy torturing people or anything like that.
All in all my expectations for this book weren't especially high after having read the previous ones, but I still can't say that I enjoyed reading it. If it weren't for the fact that I wanted to read the complete quadrology I wouldn't have bothered myself with it.