An FBI agent descends into the bowels of a maximum-security prison to seek advice from a legendary serial killer. It is impossible to hear the name Hannibal Lecter without imagining Anthony Hopkins in that scene from The Silence of the Lambs. However, long before Clarice Starling entered the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, with her good bag and cheap shoes, Special Agent Will Graham was there first.

  Hannibal Lecter is urbane, erudite, witty, charming, egotistical . . . and monstrous. He kills—and, oh yes, eats—incompetent and stupid people. Perhaps the first cannibal antihero, he is a clear antecedent to Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter Morgan, who murders killers that have escaped prosecution.

  In Red Dragon, Lecter is an enigma, labeled a sociopath because that is the only psychiatric term available to describe him. The few details known about his origins (sadism towards animals as a child, for example) are contradicted in later books. In a rare promotional statement, Harris says that, from a writer’s perspective, Lecter is both amusing and difficult company. “He’s the dark side of the world. He’s probably the wickedest man I’ve ever heard of—at the same time he tells the truth and he says some things that I suppose we would all like to say.”

  Besides being the debut of an iconic villain,Red Dragon is the book in which Thomas Harris creates the formula for modern serial-killer fiction. While spending time with the FBI studying the case files of famous mass murderers, Harris also observed the behaviorists who pursue them. His research allowed him to develop scenes like the one where Will Graham interviews a reluctant—almost hostile—witness and expertly extracts information the man didn’t know he possessed. Though Graham’s use of observation to piece together disparate clues and arrive at accurate conclusions about killers may feel clichéd now, this book is where many contemporary behaviorist clichés originated.

  Red Dragon is much more than a procedural novel, though. Conflicted by his skills, Will Graham is as fascinating as his nemesis. Despite what he claims, Graham isn’t seeking advice or insight from Lecter. He visits to “get the old scent” of a killer so he can start thinking like one again. “Why don’t you just smell yourself?” Lecter asks him. Palpable tension arises from their awareness that they are more alike than Graham could ever admit. “He understood murder uncomfortably well,” Harris writes in the final page.

  However, Graham doesn’t anticipate the risks of drawing Lecter’s undivided attention. As the man responsible for ending his reign of terror, Graham is seen by Lecter as an intellectual equal and a worthy adversary. Though onstage for only eleven pages, Lecter’s influence is felt throughout the rest of the book. By revealing Graham’s address to the serial killer known as the Tooth Fairy, Lecter puts Graham in a position where he can’t simply evaluate the evidence and go back home to his wife and stepson. To remove the target Lecter placed on his family’s back, Graham must become bait for the murderer. Even from his high-security prison cell, Lecter manipulates events in the outside world.

  Lecter isn’t the only fascinating villain in Red Dragon. Whereas Graham’s empathy allows him to think like a monster, Francis Dolarhyde (whose name brings to mind Edward Hyde of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel) is a monster who yearns to feel like a human being. Harris stops the forward momentum of the novel to devote several chapters to Dolarhyde’s origins. While the author’s attempts to explain the genesis of Lecter in subsequent books tend to undermine his potency, Dolarhyde benefits greatly from an exploration of his backstory (though it was decried as a typically knee-jerk liberal mind-set by a New York Times reviewer at the time).

  The novel was filmed twice, first by Michael Mann as Manhunter (1986) and again by Brett Ratner as Red Dragon (2002) with Anthony Hopkins reprising his Academy-Award-winning role. The first movie robs Dolarhyde of any humanity. Because Harris shows what made him the way he is, readers empathize when he meets Reba and, for the first time in his life, makes a real human connection and begins to doubt his “mission.” His story is as tragic as that of Frankenstein’s monster—created against his will and unable to find a place in society. Though the killings he committed are monstrous, when he thinks that Reba has turned against him, Dolarhyde’s rage is understandable. He’s not a superman like Lecter, just a broken man engaged in a futile search for something better. Humanizing both sides of the equation gives Red Dragon the depth that formulaic serial-killer stories often lack.

  As a former reporter, Harris is a master at showing versus telling. He reports every furrow in Graham’s brow, every crease in Dolarhyde’s forehead, and leaves it to the reader to understand why. He often establishes setting through the use of terse sentence fragments. Expository sections switch tense or use the second person. “Dr. Lecter’s eyes are maroon,” he writes, though everything else in the scene is in past tense. When Dolarhyde watches film of his next victim while Reba pleasures him, Harris again switches to present tense.

  The story’s inertia drives it to an inevitable confrontation—except that Harris doesn’t follow the predictable path. He plays with the familiar horror cliché of the supposedly dead monster reappearing, using a prestidigitator’s skill to misdirect. By creating a false denouement that focuses on how everything isn’t fine with Graham when he returns to his family, he catches even the most jaded reader off guard.

  Bev Vincent is the author of The Road to the Dark Tower, an authorized companion to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and a nominee for the 2004 nonfiction Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. His column “News From the Dead Zone” has appeared in Cemetery Dance magazine since 2001. Some of his fifty short stories have appeared in anthologies like Bram Stoker Award winner From the Borderlands, the Mystery Writers of America anthology The Blue Religion, and Doctor Who: Destination Prague. He coedited The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book, writes for Onyx Reviews, and contributes a monthly essay to Storytellers Unplugged. His script for Stephen King’s Gotham Café won the Best Adaptation Award at the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival.

  80

  Jack Ketchum’s

  OFF SEASON (1981)

  Blake Crouch

  Jack Ketchum, a pseudonym for Dallas Mayr (1946–), owns some of the blackest real estate in the world of thriller fiction. A former literary agent and actor, Ketchum published his first novel,Off Season, to the dismay of the mainstream literary establishment and the delight of what would grow into a cult following. Over the last quarter of a century, he has published numerous novels, novellas, and works of short fiction. However, only in the last five years has he gained notoriety, largely due to the praises of Stephen King. In 2003, while accepting the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, King said, “There’s another writer here tonight who writes under the name of Jack Ketchum and he has also written what may be the best book of his career, a long novella called The Crossings. Have you read it? Have any of the judges read it?” In his approach to thrillers, as typified by The Lost, Red, She Wakes, and The Girl Next Door, Ketchum defines fearless and unflinching.

  Off Season isn’t Jack Ketchum’s best book or even his most disturbing. It is, however, his first and his most important, since it remapped the boundaries of where writers could go in the name of suspense.

  But as often happens when something different arrives, the critics didn’t understand. The Village Voice condemned Off Season as violent pornography, and even Ketchum’s publisher and distributors were stricken with a late case of buyer’s remorse, finally losing their nerve about giving the book the full marketing and publicity push they had originally intended. Then there were the edits Ketchum was strong-armed into making—the toning down of the most brutal scenes (no recipe for man-meat jerky or cock-stump spitting), and an absolute ultimatum from his publisher to let a character live whom he had every intention of killing—so that the 1981 publication, while still chock-full of groundbreaking unpleasantness , did not embody Ketchum’s initial vision, which was to write, in his words, something with the “kind of teeth pretty much unseen before in mass-market fiction.” Following its initial 1981 publication, the book promptly went out of print until Leisure Press finally released Ketchum’s uncut, uncensored version of the novel a quarter of a century later in 2006.

  Enviably accomplished for a debut novel,Off Season draws its inspiration from the legend of Sawney Bean, the Scottish leader of a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century clan that engaged in mass murder and cannibalism until their capture, torture, and execution.Off Season’s narrative structure, while by no means revolutionary, is deceptively simple and ingenious. Six friends meet at a remote cabin in the Maine woods, not far from the coast—Nick, Marjie, Dan, Laura, Carla, and Jim. One of the most intelligent choices Ketchum makes is not to rush anything. The first 130 pages are essentially violence free and dedicated to the introduction of the six main characters, along with foreshadowing of the horrible events to come. The sense of increasing dread is palpable, and by the time the family of cannibals gets around to attacking the vacationers at the cabin, the suspense has been ratcheted to an unbearable degree.

  If the first 130 pages are prelude, the last 140 are the roughest, nastiest, and most brutal you will ever read. “Unflinching” is thrown around liberally these days, to the point where the word has lost its impact. But Ketchum truly is unflinching in a way that few other writers have dared to be, and this is what sets him and his debut novel apart. The author’s chief talent lies in creating scenes of overwhelming violence in such a lean, straightforward, and disinterested style, that it is simultaneously torture to read but impossible to look away.

  Witness Ketchum’s portrayal of the second character’s death:

  In a slow, deliberate motion he reached into the chest and touched the heart. It was still warm, still beating. He severed the veins and arteries with the knife and lifted the muscle into the light, and still it beat, steaming in the cool air. For the man this moment was the nexus of all mystery and wonder, the closest thing he knew to worship. He stared until finally the heart was still.

  At the center of the carnage and mayhem stands the character of George Peters, the decent lawman, appalled and disgusted by what he sees, an early incarnation of Sheriff Bell from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, and Police Chief Marge Gunderson of Fargo fame. Sheriff Peters is order, or the attempt to restore order in the face of pure depravity, and like the reader, if he escapes harm, it is only a physical escape. His and our psyches will never recover.

  Though Off Season was published at a time when such independent slasher films as Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) were challenging the shock value of Psycho, there is little to compare. Those films are comical, cheap, even childish in their treatment of violence, in a way that is completely diametric to the very adult study of violence that is the foundation of Off Season. If anything, the novel was a nod to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974),The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and a precursor to Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial novel,American Psycho (1991), Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), and the best work of Takashi Miike, the prolific Japanese director of such ultraviolent films as Audition (1999) and Ichi the Killer (2001).

  What makes Off Season so effective and important is Ketchum’s masterful manipulation of the reader. Just as in Psycho, Off Season’s erstwhile hero, Carla, is killed first and most horribly. This is Ketchum grabbing the bullhorn and screaming at the reader: “No one is safe or off-limits in this book! Not even you!” And while Off Season muses on such “big ideas” as the rational vs. the natural, the family unit, and urban vs. rural, its most enduring message concerns the abrupt ugliness of human violence, and how people face such extreme situations and horrors that come out of nowhere. The violence that occurs in this book touches us so profoundly because it is perfectly reminiscent of the awful and sudden turns that life can take. It is ultimately the unpredictable, uncompromising way Ketchum rains his terrors down upon his characters and the reader that earns Off Season a place in the canon of classic thriller fiction.

  Off Season may upset you. It may even make you sick. But it won’t make you feel cheap. Whether you have the nerve to experience what Ketchum has to say about violence and the human condition is another matter. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  Blake Crouch was born near the Piedmont town of Statesville, North Carolina, in 1978. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated in 2000 with degrees in English and creative writing. His first two novels, Desert Places and Locked Doors, were published in 2004 and 2005. Inspired by his relocation to Durango, Colorado, he wrote Abandon (2009), a novel set in the past and present in a remote mining town high in the San Juan Mountains. His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, an anthology from Bleak House Books titled Uncage Me, and ITW’s Thriller 2 anthology. David Morrell called him, “One of the most exciting new thriller writers I’ve read in years.”

  81

  Thomas Perry’s

  THE BUTCHER’S BOY (1982)

  Robert Liparulo

  Thomas Perry (1947–) was born in Tonawanda, New York. After earning a B.A. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Rochester, he banged around in a variety of jobs: commercial fisherman, weapons mechanic, university administrator, and teacher. Then he began honing his skills as a writer on such television shows as Simon and Simon,21 Jump Street, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. His first novel,The Butcher’s Boy, was published in 1982. The thriller garnered a bevy of critical praise (the Washington Post called it “a stunning debut”) and an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best First Novel. Each of his subsequent novels—such as Metzger’s Dog (1983),Big Fish (1985), and Island (1987)—pulled in more fans. But it wasn’t until 1995’s Vanishing Act that Perry became a blip on seemingly every thriller buff’s radar. The book introduced the character of Jane Whitefield, an unofficial one-woman witness protection program, who became so popular that Perry continued her saga through four back-to-back sequels. (After ten years and five stand-alone novels, Perry gave Jane a long-awaited comeback in 2009’s Runner.) Still, many thriller aficionados—including Michael Connelly, who sang the book’s praises in an introduction to the 2003 reissue—consider The Butcher’s Boy perhaps the best of Perry’s seventeen novels. It shattered their expectations of what a “thriller” meant.

  Like the characters that people his stories, Thomas Perry is a master rule breaker. And he didn’t waste time proving it. His first novel,The Butcher’s Boy, turned thriller conventions on their heads, starting with its unlikely principal protagonist, a cold-blooded killer. As if making readers side with such an apparently unsympathetic character wasn’t enough of a challenge, Perry eschews typical gimmicks often used to soften readers’ hearts. He refuses to divulge the assassin’s name, forcing us to think of him only as the titular Butcher’s Boy, whose mentor was a Latvian butcher and brilliant assassin. He has no extraordinary physical features with which we can identify; rather, he is “a man not fat, not thin, not young, not old, not tall, not short, not dark, not light.” We can’t even sympathize with his choice of victims. The promise of a paycheck drives him to murder a grandfatherly senator, and he kills two muggers after rendering them unconscious.

  It’s a testament to Perry’s skill that we do start to like the guy. As Perry says in an interview, “Slowly, we begin to appreciate his competence, his courage, his cunning, and his sheer tenacity, his determination to live. Soon we realize that, while he is a bad man, he is up against adversaries who are much, much worse.”

  Looking at thrillers published before and since The Butcher’s Boy, it’s not difficult to believe the novel ushered in a new era of the antihero— the flawed, even amoral protagonist readers find themselves grudgingly rooting for. Not that criminal protagonists are new (think Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, and Richard Stark’s Parker), but their presence seems stronger today than ever before (Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, Andrew Vachss’s Burke, Michael Connelly’s Cassie Black, Barry Eisler’s John Rain, Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter Morgan).

  The story opens with the Butcher’s Boy assassinating a small-time machinist in California. This draws the attention of Elizabeth Waring, a young employee in the Justice Department’s organized crime unit. She’s a brilliant analyst, but lacks the field experience required to move up, so her supervisor helps her by sending her to investigate. Upon the death of that aforementioned grandfatherly senator, Waring is ordered to Denver to represent her agency in the inquiry.

  The Boy travels to Las Vegas to collect his fee. Instead, his Mafia employers decide he knows too much and make a botched attempt to kill him. With mob goons and federal investigators closing in on him, the Boy sets out to settle the score. As capos begin dropping like slot machine coins, Waring “correctly perceives the patterns and goes in the right directions,” Perry explains, “but can never persuade her superiors to believe her theories, much less to act on them in time.” She is always one step behind the Boy.