Sunday, May 17, 2009

Hannibal

Yesterday evening I was listening to an episode of The Price of Fear, which was a radio series from the 1970s of one off half hour radio horror plays hosted by Vincent Price. This one was about a fake medium who has a shock when she comes into contact with real spirits. Later on I was also listening to a series called The Game is Afoot, which was a three hour long cleebration of Sherlock Holmes on radio, and consisted of six half hour plays from various eras of radio from 1945 to 2004. They were really good.

I finished reading the novel Hannibal by Thomas Harris last night. The story takes place several years after the notorious serial killer Dr Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter escaped custody and is now living under an assumed name in Venice. However the police and the FBI are not the only people hunting Lecter, so to is wealthy sadist Mason Verger who barely survived an encounter with Lecter but was left hideously disfigured and hooked up to a life support machine. Verger has a horrific revenge planned for Lecter and to capture him, he plans to use the disgraced FBI agent Clarice Starling, the only person known to have gotten close to Lecter, as unwitting bait in his trap. The book follows two previous Lecter novels (Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs) however this novel is less of a psychological crime thriller and more like a darkly comic tragedy. It's well written, suspenseful, witty and very gruesome.

This morning I went along with my Dad to the Ocean Terminal shopping centre. We had a scone and a cappuccino for breakfast and then went for a walk around. I got a few new posters. For lunch Dad and I went along to the Gourmet Burger Kitchen where I had a Cajun Burger and some Budvar beer. After that we went back to my parents house for awhile before going home. My Mum is on holiday in Spain for a week.

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