"Hannibal," the film, is king of America's box office, proving that the urbane cannibalistic genius who first came to life in Thomas Harris' 1981 novel, "Red Dragon," still has an iron grip on the American imagination. The same goes for "Hannibal," the book, which has been raking in shameful quantities of filthy lucre in royalties for Harris since its publication last year. Read the book, and you'll have a hard time figuring out what all the fuss is about.

The novel opens with its sleek, soft-spoken anti-hero, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, enjoying his freedom as the curator of an art museum in Florence, feasting on nothing more troubling than white truffles and the occasional viola da gamba player-content, as it were, to live out the remainder of his life delighting in the writing style of Nero Capponi and penning the occasional epistle to object-of-desire / worthy opponent FBI agent Clarice Starling. Good god, Hannibal Lecter has become … domesticated?

I half-expected Hannibal to pull out his fluffy pink slippers while listening to his precious Goldberg Variations and sipping hideously expensive Château d'Yquem. The monster has become a dandy, and though the two are sometimes not mutually exclusive, Lecter's fetish for women's hand soaps is more than a little dubious.

Dr. Lecter's peace is troubled only by the vengeful Mason Verger, the only one of the good Doctor's victims to survive-albeit lipless, noseless and "with no soft tissue on his face"-who is set on feeding Dr. Lecter feet first to a herd of specially bred carnivorous pigs. What follows this promising premise is a vaguely entertaining, vaguely listless tale meandering across continents, caught between unnecessarily bloody acts on the one hand and dry personal history on the other, without any well-thought-out connection between the two.

There are some noteworthy scenes, combining humor and terror in a trademark Harris touch, such as when Lecter remarks idly to the unwitting police inspector who stumbles on Lecter's true identity: "I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife."

But these delicious (no pun intended) moments are few and far between, as Harris seems to be aiming less for terror and more for a Biblical epiphany on the nature of good and evil-an epiphany which smacks of the old theory that, yes, there is a very fine line between good and evil and sometimes, just sometimes, life must be expressed in shades of gray.

At the end of the novel, we leave Dr. Lecter indulging in a cozy little tête-à-tête, 'having an old friend for dinner'-but only, sadly enough, in the most conventional sense.