You can't reduce me to a set of influences. . . . Even his elegant tastes seem trivialized. What seemed passionate and austere in him when pursued in the starkness of prison is reduced to effeteness when indulged in freedom. From 'Hannibal' courtesy of Random House Even Harris' prose comes a cropper as the overwrought plot progresses. Scene-setting passages become the shorthand of a screenplay.
Sentences grow Teutonically clunky.
Harris even forgets a character's name, changing Fredrica Bimmel, one of Jame Gumb's victims, to Fredericka. He was using genetics in roller pigeons as an example. They go way up in the air and roll over and over backwards in a display, falling toward the ground. There are shallow rollers and deep rollers. You can't breed two deep rollers or the offspring will roll all the way down, crash and die.