Red Dragon

I mentioned to a friend of mine last night that I had recently re-read Red Dragon and had to blog about it today, and his response was “Red Dragon? That’s a great book.” I found his reply noteworthy only because he’s not much of a reader, so when he mentions having really liked a book, I pay attention. I was thinking about his response earlier today, thinking of how I’d spin it into a blog entry on how Red Dragon was a book so great even “non-readers” sang its praises. I read some of my classmates’ blogs, all of whom seemed to also feel Red Dragon was a “great book”. Their entries listed, quite cogently, all the reasons the novel is considered so compelling by so many, as well as addressed the fact that it is an iconic work, groundbreaking for its time.

I won’t argue with Red Dragon’s icon status, but I will posit that it’s not actually a great book.

Yeah, I said it; it’s not a great book. Sure, it’s a good story, fast paced, full of vaguely interesting characters and downright creepy in parts. It’s well written and clearly well researched. However, it’s also full of stereotypes, cookie cutter characters and tired plot devices.

Let’s start with the circumstances in which we first encounter Will Graham. The man’s had a fairly serious mental breakdown and nearly died at the hands of Hannibal Lecter (or rather, Dr. Lecter’s linoleum knife) and now he’s just trying to live a nice, quiet life with his wife and stepson. I don’t buy that Jack Crawford would find it expeditious or wise to involve Graham in the manhunt for the “Tooth Fairy”, nor do I believe Graham would accept Crawford’s challenge with as little reluctance as he does. Now, I realize much of the horror canon – books and film – is precipitated on the “Don’t go in the house alone” syndrome, but I just found it incredibly hard to stomach the notion that Graham would get back in the ring, so to speak, with such haste and so little thought. So, there’s that.

Then there’s our bad guy, Mr. Dolarhyde, who frightens me about as much as Casper the Friendly Ghost. He is the Everyman of serial killers: he’s deformed, his parents abandoned him, his fellow orphans tormented him, and his grandmother abused him. Stop me if you’ve heard this tune before. Very Norman Bates, as one of my classmates pointed out in their blog entry. (That was Jen Loring, I think.) His crimes are horrific, true enough, and I’ll be forever haunted by the scene in which he kills Freddy Lounds, the tabloid reporter, but compared to other fictional and/or real accounts of serial murders, Dolarhyde’s actions seem almost tame. I did like the idea of his falling in love with Reba and wanting to “reform” for her sake compelling, though. I may have to use that one in a book of my own some day.

Finally, the book is incredibly dated, though this doesn’t detract from the fact that, for it’s time, it WAS revolutionary. The twenty-five plus intervening years haven’t been kind to some of the plot details. Think about Dolarhyde’s day job, the means through which he selects his victims. Nobody sends film away to be processed anymore. Now, it can be argued that his job was only a minor detail and thoroughly interchangeable, that he could have had any job and the book would have been largely the same.

And that’s the rub, this whole book is interchangeable. It reads like every other novel about a serial killer and the police working feverishly around the clock to stop him that I’ve ever had occasion to read. It’s a premise that’s just been done to death.