Becoming a Monster, Becoming a Man
In "Red Dragon" Thomas Harris commits to his characters in all their fucked-up glory—and so should you
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“And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems” —Revelation 12:3
MAGNIFICENT, ISN’T IT? You could gaze at it in wonder for a long time. Maybe, if you stare long enough, you’ll start to see yourself. Your potential. What you can Become. Powerful. Awe-inspiring. Divine. The true you. And when, His great wings outstretched, the Dragon finally speaks, noticing at last the cosmic speck of your wretched existence, you will heed the Red Dragon’s words—you will do anything He commands you.
So it goes in the novel that catapulted Thomas Harris’ career, the one that precedes Silence of the Lambs. Reading it, you feel you’re at the rim of a great void, peering in. Ever crept too close to the cliff edge? Your footing slips, your heart lurches in your chest, and with a flash of prescience you see, you accept, your imminent death. At its best, Red Dragon feels a little like that.
“SEE THE CHILD,” opens McCarthy’s masterpiece Blood Meridian. It would make an effective opening for this book too: to see and be seen lies at the black heart of it. Will Graham, FBI psycho specialist and hunter of serial murderers, can “see” into the minds of the sickos he pursues—call it radical empathy—which makes him the opposite of a psychopath. Whereas the emotionally crippled killer, who works in a photo lab, sees his victims in swiped home video footage of middle-class all-American families, his gaze lingering obsessively on Mommy.
Disfigured facially since birth, Francis Dolarhyde does not like when people look at him—that is, until Will Graham and, through him, the great psychiatrist/insane cannibal Hannibal Lecter see Francis for what he really is: a man convinced he’s transforming into the Great Red Dragon trapped on the page by William Blake circa 1805, the beast which bellows to Francis from the top of the stairs just like his grandmother used to—his grandma who once clamped his little cock between the jaws of a scissors after he wet the bed. Yes, Francis is one fucked-up little boy.
Harris revels in it. That’s the key to this book’s brilliance, I think: the author is not afraid to let his characters take him to messed-up places. And there are some beautifully twisted moments indeed, all glazed in sweaty, urgent paranoia: face biting, skin gluing, jerking off to snuff. Someone’s burned alive. It’s wild stuff, told with gleeful madness. The pages turn themselves.
What makes a novel distinct, what makes it yours, lies in the little details. The way a character speaks, like Dolarhyde doing his utmost to avoid sibilant sounds, which expose his deformity. Or the fact he places shards of glass over his slaughtered victims’ eyes in order to see in their gaze the majesty of his Becoming. Maybe the texture of the dialogue or the crisp, surgical prose. The idiosyncrasies.
And it’s also about being weird. Being fearlessly yourself. Red Dragon was a fucking sensation when it came out and has sold millions of copies, and, like, the killer in this book literally films himself slaughtering whole families while naked and wearing his dead grandma’s false teeth, which he bites them with, and then he jerks off to the footage later! Be fearless in your writing. There are a whole lot of readers out there eager to be surprised—to feel something.
Ultimately, the kind of art that lives on is deeply authentic, unapologetically itself. To write fiction is a spiritual thing. We tune our brain waves to a higher frequency and we vibrate with the stars, man. Writing fiction, if you’re doing it right, is brutally difficult. If you pursue it seriously, it will eventually cost you everything. Never half-ass it. Give it everything you have or do something less punishing—the people in your life will love you for it. Trust me.
TO KEEP THOSE pages turning, that is the goal. Everything else—your feelings and your ideas and your ego—falls second.1 That’s not to say simple entertainment. Entertainment is easy and hollow in the middle. We’re talking about magic: to take a piece of the human experience and plant it in the heart of a stranger.
Harris writes like this could be a mantra. Notice here, on page one, how he leaps off the blocks from the novel’s opening sentence and keeps it moving, injecting exposition without slowing down.
Will Graham sat Crawford down at a picnic table between the house and the ocean and gave him a glass of iced tea.
Jack Crawford looked at the pleasant old house, salt-silvered wood in the clear light. “I should have caught you in Marathon when you got off work,” he said. “You don’t want to talk about it here.”
“I don’t want to talk about it anywhere, Jack. You’ve got to talk about it, so let’s have at it. Just don’t get out any pictures. If you brought pictures, leave them in the briefcase—Molly and Willy will be back soon.”
“How much do you know?”
“What was in the Miami Herald and the Times,” Graham said. “Two families killed in their houses a month apart. Birmingham and Atlanta. The circumstances were similar.”
“Not similar. The same.”
[skipping some lines]
“He’s not too comfortable with locks,” Crawford said. “Used a glass cutter and a suction cup to get in the house last time. Oh, and his blood’s AB positive.”
“Somebody hurt him?”
“Not that we know of. We typed him from semen and saliva. He’s a secretor.” Crawford looked out at the flat sea. “Will, I want to ask you something. You saw this in the papers. The second one was all over the TV. Did you ever think about giving me a call?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“There weren’t many details at first on the one in Birmingham. It could have been anything—revenge, a relative.”
“But after the second one, you knew what it was.”
“Yeah. A psychopath. I didn’t call you because I didn’t want to. I know who you have already to work on this. You’ve got the best lab. You’d have Heimlich at Harvard, Bloom at the University of Chicago—”
“And I’ve got you down here fixing fucking boat motors.”
“I don’t think I’d be all that useful to you, Jack. I never think about it anymore.”
“Really? You caught two. The last two we had, you caught.”
“How? By doing the same things you and the rest of them are doing.”
“That’s not entirely true, Will. It’s the way you think.”
And just like that we are introduced to a core concept: Graham’s ability to “see” what others can’t. That is how you start a story and especially a thrilling one: charge at the reader; toss them into a scene and make them curious. Then keep things moving. If you have a niggling feeling part of your story is dragging, it probably is. You need less on the page than you think you do. Trust your readers. They’re pretty sharp.
“If you brought pictures, leave them in the briefcase—Molly and Willy will be back soon.”
This is the first real indication that something particularly awful has happened. Something gruesome, we fear. A single well-placed line of dialogue. Harris doesn’t linger on it, moving immediately to key details of the case. Half a page in and we’re more than curious, information coming at us swiftly. It feels like we’re watching a documentary, or the home video footage Dolarhyde trawls through for victims. Like him, we can’t look away.
“…Oh, and his blood’s AB positive.”
“Somebody hurt him?”
I love Graham’s response here. Like good movie dialogue, it moves quick enough we must think fast to keep up. Graham’s leap to this conclusion characterizes him efficiently: this is a man who has faced darkness. And yet his immediate concern is that someone might be hurt. To me, having read the book, that line evokes Graham’s extreme sensitivity, his almost painful revulsion toward brutality. It also shows that he’s intelligent. This rapid-fire, characterized dialogue forces us to pay close attention. That means we’re not bored.
Notice also how few words there are, how sparsely Harris sprinkles brief lines of action between the well-developed dialogue. It’s a cliché but true: in writing, less is more. When language is stripped back, the words grow powerful, their placement deliberate. In tattooing, traditional Japanese pieces demand a master artist at the height of her powers despite the style’s relative simplicity. “It could be said that all tattoo roads lead back to the Japanese tattoo,” writes master tattooist Carl Hallowell, “the zenith of the art form worldwide.”
Writers are obsessed with exposition, afraid of it, but I’m here to tell you the good news: it’s not a real thing, not really, so don’t worry about it. Every scene, if it’s good, communicates information. Style and execution decide if it feels like exposition. In the above extract, did you feel like you were being told information?
FRANCIS DOLARHYDE IS tortured by what it means to be a man, or what he thinks it means anyway, his certainty he cannot measure up. In an increasingly hopeless society, this describes many males whose self-loathing leads them to far-right echo chambers and accelerationist ideology, boys and men so certain of the ugliness of their souls they would destroy everything beautiful until the world reflects, like glass placed over a slaughtered family’s eyes, the ugliness they see inside themselves. It is Graham’s empathy, a trait which psychopaths by definition do not have, that gives him the upper hand. And isn’t that exactly what fiction does too? Expand our empathy. Gift us the ability to see.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”
—Elon Musk, world’s richest Nazi psychopath
In one thrilling sequence, Dolarhyde, overcome with a need to break free of the Dragon’s hold, devours the original Blake painting at Brooklyn Museum, his hate literally eradicating art. It might sound exciting, and a little silly, happening as it does inside a book, yet the very real monsters ruling over us are busy eradicating our humanity too. Artificial intelligence (aka theft). Streaming (aka theft). Book bans. Defunding art to push hollowed-out entertainment which neglects to challenge the systems that crush us. Their insanity infects everything. Indeed, reading Red Dragon in 2025, I see its madness reflected everywhere I look.
Extracts are taken with appreciation from Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (Putnam, 1981)
There are no rules in art. Write whatever the hell you want to write, express whatever you wish to express. But if you want your pages to turn themselves, this is the way.
Super comments and dialogue 👍