Red Dragon is a thriller novel written by Thomas Harris featuring the brilliant psychiatrist and serial killer Dr Hannibal Lecter. It was originally published in 1981, but found a new audience in the early 1990s after the success of its sequel, The Silence of the Lambs. The title refers to a painting by William Blake, "The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun".

Red Dragon is, in both publishing chronology and story order, the first book in the Lecter trilogy. The story takes place before the events in The Silence of the Lambs, and after Lecter's original capture and incarceration. While Lecter plays a central role, Red Dragon focuses more on the characters of Will Graham and the tortured serial killer, Francis Dolarhyde.

Synopsis

Will Graham is called out of retirement by the FBI to help track down a serial killer known to law enforcement agencies and the press only as "The Tooth Fairy," who has murdered two families. Graham retired after being nearly killed by the serial killer Hannibal Lecter, who was subsequently captured in the process. Graham turns to Lecter for help in tracking down The Tooth Fairy. However, Graham discovers that Lecter is manipulating not only him but also the man he is hunting.

The relationship between Lecter and Graham parallels the relationship between Lecter and Clarice Starling in the later books, but here there are different overtones. Lecter treats Starling as an unworthy student but Graham as a fellow professional (though not an equal). Lecter's acceptance of Graham does not stop at the being "professional" level, but extends further into the overlapping realm between Graham's and Lecter's psyches.

A complication in the investigation is Freddie Lounds, a tabloid reporter who once ran afoul of Graham during the Lecter case and is now dogging him to get the story on The Tooth Fairy. The Tooth Fairy is Francis Dolarhyde. Dolarhyde, an avid reader of Lounds' paper, The National Tattler, is displeased with what Lounds writes about him, and brutally murders him.

Dolarhyde meets Reba McClane, a blind co-worker at Chromalux Film & Videotape Services, where Dolarhyde's work gives him access to the home movies which the company transfers to videocassette. Dolarhyde and McClane begin a romantic relationship. Dolarhyde's newfound love conflicts with his homicidal urges, which manifest themselves in his mind as a separate personality he calls "The Great Red Dragon," after the Blake painting. Posing as a researcher, Dolarhyde enters the Brooklyn Museum, beats a museum secretary unconscious, and eats the original Blake watercolour of The Red Dragon which is kept there, believing that if he consumes the Dragon, he can stop killing and pursue a normal relationship with McClane.

After Lecter gives Dolarhyde Graham's address in code (through the personal advertisements in The Tattler), thus endangering Graham and his family, Graham becomes obsessed with the case, eventually realizing that the killer knew the layout of his victims' houses from their home videos, which he only could have seen if he worked for Chromalux. Sensing that he is about to be caught, Dolarhyde goes to see McClane one last time, but he finds her talking to a co-worker, Ralph Mandy. Enraged, Dolorhyde kills Ralph Mandy, kidnaps McClane and, having taken her to his house, sets the place on fire. He apparently intends to kill her and then himself, but finds himself unable to shoot her. After Dolarhyde apparently shoots himself, McClane escapes.

Graham is given Dolarhyde's scrapbook, saved from the wreckage of the house, which details the killer's obsession with the Blake painting and his admiration of Hannibal Lecter as well as the abuse Dolarhyde suffered as a child at the hands of his grandmother, which evidently turned him into a monster.

It transpires that Dolarhyde had not shot himself, but merely the body of a previous victim. Dolarhyde pursues Graham to his home, and attacks Graham's family. Dolarhyde gains the upper hand and is about to kill Graham when Graham's wife, Molly, strikes him with an aluminium fishing rod, embedding a barbed hook into his cheek. After recovering, Graham receives a letter from Lecter.

One of the main themes covered in the book is Will Graham's struggle with his own nature – specifically, his ability to think and feel like a serial killer. Will's greatest fear is that he differs from the likes of Lecter and Dolarhyde by only the slim barrier erected by personal choice; that he is really a deranged and demented being who chooses to engage in an eternal standoff with his darker impulses. This ability to have final dominance over one's impulses is what Dolarhyde sought to establish by eating the Blake painting.

It is no accident that Lecter calls Dolarhyde "Pilgrim". Yet, where Lecter is base and primal in his communications with Dolarhyde ("You're very beautiful"), he behaves in a cultured, refined manner in his dealings with Graham. Lecter symbolizes a midpoint between the two journeyman "monsters" – Dolarhyde, who is at a "less-evolved" state where he still acts solely to sate his impulses, and Graham, who instead fights his darker nature and uses it to hunt those who would not share his fight. Lecter, who has chosen to rationalize and intellectualize his actions by killing only the rude and incompetent, seems to harbor an affinity towards Graham, perhaps because of their similar backgrounds in academia and their mutual disdain for 'irrational' killing, but most likely because Graham's decision is based on choice. Dolarhyde, in believing he has no choice in the matter, exhibits weaker mental fortitude, and thus places himself below Graham in Lecter's eyes.

A key moment in this storyline occurs when Graham tries to goad Lecter into helping him catch the Dragon. Graham suggests it would be an opportunity to prove that Lecter is smarter than the emerging Dragon character. Lecter proves himself capable of meeting Graham's challenge, ruining both Dolarhyde and Graham, having set the two against each other. Dolarhyde leaves Graham with a permanent disfigurement, something Graham's mind will be hard-pressed to ignore as a sort of "mark of the beast", a reminder of what he is. Harris foreshadows Graham's fate during Lecter and Graham's exchange on the Tooth Fairy's self-loathing and disfigurement. Lecter accomplishes all of this on a whim while incarcerated in a maximum security facility.

Lecter's wit and charm, his ability to toy with people and to remain a serious threat even while imprisoned and heavily restrained and the obvious fear he evokes through this, were all used by Harris to create a dark mystique and infamy around the Lecter character, which Harris highlights by refusing to ever directly mention the nature of Lecter's crimes or his exact methods of murder. This leaves the reader with the challenge of reconciling the debonair and affluent, if evidently sadistic character whom they are introduced to through the narrative, with the psychotic mass-murderer perception Harris deliberately builds up around the character of Dr. Lecter, but never in his presence. It was these qualities and their contrast with the usual slasher-story method of totally dehumanizing the killer through excruciating explication which made the Lecter character such a show-stealer, and set the stage for that character to become the subject-in-his-own-right of the now world-famous "Hannibal Lecter" series of books which have inspired the blockbuster films.