◇ ◇ ◇ ‘Fame is more of a nuisance than anything else.’ “I once asked him what he did, and he said he was an author, and I said, ‘Anything I would have heard of?’” says Boykin. Though Harris has been involved in the center since 1999, no one realized who he was until a few years ago, its executive director, Christopher Boykin, told me. “I felt like I was being watched, and sure enough,” he says of the owls. “There was an opossum sleeping in here last time I was here,” he says, before asking about some baby owls he had seen perched on a cabinet. When we arrived, he greeted the director and staff, and inquired about animals he saw on his last visit. He’s brought orphaned squirrels and an injured ibis there, and he took a wildlife rehabilitation workshop, learning how to intubate a distressed animal by practicing on a dead possum. Harris, a nature lover, has been visiting the center regularly for 20 years. Cari works there as a volunteer, caring for injured birds. Harris and I met on a bright, muggy morning in the parking lot of the Pelican Harbor Seabird Station, an animal rescue center on Biscayne Bay that features prominently in his new novel. He hasn’t given a substantive interview since the mid-1970s, because he prefers to let his work speak for itself, he says. He doesn’t do book signings or author appearances. But relatively little is known about Harris or his creative process. It’s not that Harris has a particularly gruesome imagination, it’s that he’s a keen observer and a chronicler of people and their darkest impulses.įor nearly 45 years, Harris has terrified audiences with his grisly novels, which have sold more than 50 million copies, and introduced one of the most memorable fictional villains of all time - up there with Darth Vader and Dracula. Harris, 78, repeats this idea, or a variation of it, nearly every time I ask him about the origins of a plot point or a character, and it occurs to me that his answer is scarier than anything I could have anticipated. You don’t have to make anything up in this world.” “I don’t think I’ve ever made up anything,” he tells me as we drive across Miami’s 79th Street Causeway, which takes us past a small island called Bird Key where a climactic scene in his new novel, “Cari Mora,” takes place. So it’s somewhat unnerving to hear Harris insist that he doesn’t invent anything.
His infamous serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, devours his victims’ organs after delicately preparing them, and once ate a man alive, serving slices of his brain with truffles and caper berries.
MIAMI - Thomas Harris, the creator of one of literature’s most terrifying monsters, arguably has one of the darkest imaginations of any writer working today.
0 kommentar(er)
