Media has made killers cute. We've given them sardonic voice overs in TV shows. Some have become "I can fix them" characters in books. They'll kill only the bad people, or so the authors would have us believe. That's not how these people work. The reality is that everyone around a serial killer will be in some way damaged or destroyed by them. Other people's pain is their point.

Red Dragon, written in 1981, doesn't do cute. In this book anyone who brushes by evil or confronts it ends up in a worse position afterwards. How could it be otherwise when facing sociopaths and sadists? Someone has to take the blows from these people and in FBI Profiler, Will Graham's case it's him. Graham is intelligent, empathetic and a sacrificial lamb.

Will Graham can put himself in the predator's shoes. He figures out their motivations and the actions those motivations will drive. This puts a distance between him and regular people as he fears he's one degree of separation from the savages he hunts. The problem for Graham is that the predators take as much of an interest in him as he does in them. 

An imprisoned former psychiatrist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter being Graham's most dangerous fan. Lecter here is a supporting character who acts as an evil force. Early on in the book he's offended by Graham's aftershave, I'm convinced the chaos he causes for Graham later is to drive a change of cologne.

A set of brutal family murders by a killer nicknamed the Tooth Fairy, later revealed to be the Red Dragon, has Graham looking for a way into the killer's mind. Lecter gives it to him, and by extension us. It's the strength of the writing that you can empathise with the killer, Francis Dolarhyde, as a result of the abuse he suffered since birth. Then despise him for his insane and murderous actions in the same paragraph.

This is a good book. It's well written, its use of words is tight, and it pushes the realism of the situation by delivering no catharsis. Good people do everything right here and they still lose. I was going to plunge into The Silence Of The Lambs straight after this but right now I don't want to. Next I'll read something where good triumphs and evil is defeated. You know, something not realistic at all.