The Silence of the Lambs

⚖The case for it

Hannibal Lecter, the most iconic villain in American crime fiction. FBI trainee Clarice Starling seeks help from a cannibalistic psychiatrist to catch a serial killer. Harris created something unprecedented: a monster of genuine intellectual refinement who sees the audience's fascination and plays to it. Spawned a thousand imitators; none has matched it.

— the canon

✕The case against

Lecter, the refined genius-cannibal, is a fine invention that has since hardened into cliché through Harris's own sequels and a thousand imitations. The deeper trouble is Buffalo Bill, the killer Starling hunts: he is built on a queasy conflation of gender nonconformity with monstrosity that has aged into something the book must answer for. The procedure around them is sturdy pulp.

— the honest librarian