I was fascinated to find two new books about two very interesting scary authors. Stephen King and Thomas Harris.

Harris is the guy who wrote the Hannibal Lecter books.

The King book, Monsters in the Archives by Caroline Bicks, sounds interesting, a deep dive into his great books.

It isn’t. She breaks down his first draft, edits, changes on each one, on and on. I love the finished product but I don’t need to know what did or didn’t make it in the book through editing.

On the contrary, Hannibal Lecter by Brian Raftery is fascinating. While he focuses on the development of Lecter, he fills in interesting blanks and detail in fine form. Harris is a strange duck. Almost never interviewed, he literally hid out between the books that took him forever to write and he did his research, from Black Sunday through Red Dragon and Silence of Lambs and more. He only wrote a half dozen books.

If you are a fan of the Lecter books, you will love this one, I recommend it just as strongly as I suggest a hard pass on the King lesson on how sausage is made instead of how good it is to eat. Oops, Lecter is listening.