Dispatch from dementia: Having stayed up most of the night reading Hannibal (Delacorte Press, $27.95), Thomas Harris‘ sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, I’ve been looking over my shoulder to stare down the type of people routinely investigated by the Behavioral Science section of the FBI, the type of people who have been following me around with great frequency since the night I read the book. Just staring at them doesn’t do much good. I have at least assured myself that Dr. Hannibal Lecter would never bother himself to come all the way to Austin in our discomfiting heat just to get me (he’s masquerading in Florence, Italy, as it turns out). The sterile, drawn-out horror of Hannibal is convincing, far more convincing than the maudlin boogeyman copy that shows up on the front inside flap of the book to lure potential readers: “Invite Hannibal Lecter into the palace of your mind and be invited into his mind palace in turn. Note the similarities in yours and his,” blah, blah, blah. Fans of The Silence of the Lambs will be comforted to know that though the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, whose basement held Lecter for eight years, has become a derelict building awaiting demolition, a return trip there is made by Clarice Starling.
Hannibal might seem like the perfect book for FringeWare to sell except for two reasons. FringeWare is closing at the end of the month. “Since we had our bills paid and it was a slow time of year, it would probably be a good time to gracefully bow out,” Scot Casey says of the thinking behind closing the store. One of FringeWare’s charms is its inventory of gloom & doom titles that bypass the detection of horror novitiates such as myself. “I think people like something that’s … probably less threatening than some place that has Stalin on the wall and a bunch of skulls hanging around,” Casey says, though he attributes the store’s demise to “the usual reasons cited by independent stores. Basically we never were doing as well as we needed to, you know. We always were breaking even and always seemed to have our head above water, but never enough to do as much as we needed to.
“It seemed, too, as soon as we got rolling, then the Barnes & Noble opened up and the people that used to come up here and buy Bukowski and Burroughs, Kerouac and Salinger just sort of disappeared and we started building another audience with the sort of conspiracy type stuff,” though we all know anarchists never have been very organized. And then there’s that pesky issue of parking, as in there wasn’t any to really speak of. The quarterly FringeWare Review and Web site (http://www.fringeware.com) will still be in existence and Casey says it’s not out of the question that FringeWare might “evolve or transform into a space that would be smaller and less overhead.” Until June 30, they’ll be having a Duck & Cover Sale at the store …
Don’t expect Adventures in Crime & Space to be in its present location forever. Store owner Willie Siros says that the building in which his store is located is up for sale. “Many of the people who are looking at [buying] the building wouldn’t mind if we stayed, I mean I would love it if we stayed, but we still have been bouncing against the fact that there’s no parking, so I’m trying to find someplace where there’s parking,” Siros says …
Congress Avenue Booksellers has new expanded summer hours; they’re now open until 8pm Monday through Friday …
Close to half of Mysteries & More’s inventory has been sold in their closeout sale; the rest is available at greatly reduced prices. Call 837-6768 for more information.
This article appears in June 11 • 1999 and June 11 • 1999 (Cover).