Cari Mora
Thomas Harris
Copyright © Thomas Harris 2019
William Heinemann & Grand Central Publishing
You read quickly through the first three chapters of Thomas Harris’ Cari Mora with a slight sense that, gripping and strange as the story begins, it’s a bit pedestrian, not quite on the level of Silence of the Lambs.
Then you come across this line, almost out of the blue:
“He was singing in his German accent: ‘… just singing in the rains. What a glorious feeling, I am haaaappy again.’
He could see his reflection in the glass side of his liquid cremation machine where he was dissolving Karla, a girl who hadn’t worked out for business.”
OK, then. We’re in a Thomas Harris novel.
The happy fellow with the environmentally correct means of body disposal is Hans-Peter Schneider, who is a psychopathic serial killer because of course he is. Thomas Harris, right? Hans-Peter isn’t mooted to replace Hannibal Lecter as most chilling literary villain of all time, but then thousands of writers have tried over the past 30 years, and nobody has pulled it off.
Part of the reason that Cari Mora seems a bit mundane is the milieu. Drug gangs fighting it out in the waters off Miami. It’s a genre that Don Johnson bled dry, and Dexter eventually reduced to low-end hamburger paste. And Hans-Peter is likely to remind you, in the beginning at least, more of the ridiculous White Monk in DaVinci Code than Lecter. The third element is that we, the readers have changed. We are colder, harsher, more inured to cruelty and viciousness. If Harris were to invent Lecter today, to make him really scary he would have had him run for President—and win.
If it seems mundane, it is not because of the quality of the story-telling, which is superb, but because everything seems a little bit dated.
Flashes of stark brilliance abound. The book contains lines you will carry to your grave. One example: Hans-Peter is lying on his bed, watching his former hooker dissolve, and enjoying some particularly gruesome ruminations. Eventually, he dozes off, and “slept like an abattoir cat.”
Folks, Stephen King, no stranger to vivid imagery himself, would give his left nut to come up with a line like that.
But this remains a novel of profound, chilling horror. Much of it, quite unexpectedly, come in the form of the title character, Cari, a pleasant young chica from central America who dreams of becoming a veterinarian. Her back story is horrific because it’s entirely cut from the fabric of our lives. Harris either has a close friend who has her background, or did painstaking, deep interviews with people somehow not completely shattered by their experiences.
No, I’m not going to tell you. Read the fucking book.
Hans-Peter may be an abattoir kitten compared to Lecter, but his fangs are still white and gleaming, and his whiskers are red. In the words of twisted kings and walruses, he is quite a serviceable villain.
The writing reveals a careful attention to detail, and the characterizations, like those of King, are both sketched and very real, the written equivalent of an Al Hirschfeld caricature. The plot seems a bit rushed, but that reflects the length of the book. The climax takes place in a few short chapters, and the denouement takes place literally in one sentence.
It may be a brief read, but it lacks no intensity for it.