#23 in Horror
Red Dragon
- 376
- Pages
- about 7 h
- Reading time
- Film 2002 +2
- On screen
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Our view
“Red Dragon” is a manhunt thriller whose real subject is empathy. Will Graham catches killers by thinking his way into them, and Harris shows what that costs him. The murderer is given an inner life as carefully drawn as the investigator’s, which is where the book unsettles most. Some readers find it gory and slow in places, and the final chapters an awkward extra. Others say it has hardly aged.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Red Dragon is a psychological horror novel by American author Thomas Harris, first published in 1981. The story follows former FBI profiler Will Graham, who comes out of retirement to find and apprehend an enigmatic serial killer, at first nicknamed "the Tooth Fairy", before being referred to as The Dragon. The novel introduces the character Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer to whom Graham reluctantly turns for advice and with whom he has a dark past.
Reading order · Hannibal Lecter
Full order & progress →- Red DragonThis book
7.97.9 / 10 - The Silence of the Lambs
8.38.3 / 10 - Hannibal
7.37.3 / 10 - Hannibal Rising
7.07.0 / 10
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen 3 times — from 1986 to 2013.
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.0 across 662 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 82% of the weight and the score stays at 7.9 — the Horror average of 7.5 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.6 | 36 | 5% |
| Hardcover | 8.0 | 626 | 95% |
Frequently asked
How long is Red Dragon?
It has 376 pages — shorter than 78% of the ranked books in Horror.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Horror — with scores between 7.5 and 8.3, closest to this book.
