The story follows former FBI profiler Will Graham, who comes out of retirement to find and apprehend an enigmatic serial killer nicknamed "the Tooth Fairy".

The novel introduces the character Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer whom Graham reluctantly turns to for advice and with whom he has a dark past.

Directed by Michael Mann, the film received mixed reviews and fared poorly at the box office, but it has since developed a cult following.

[2] After Harris wrote a sequel to the novel, The Silence of the Lambs (1988), that was turned into a highly successful film of the same name in 1991, Red Dragon found a new readership.

In 1976, Will Graham, a brilliant profiler of the FBI, captured the serial killer Hannibal Lecter, a world-renowned psychiatrist who artistically killed and ate his victims.

Three years later, in 1979, a serial killer nicknamed "The Tooth Fairy" stalks and murders seemingly random families during sequential full moons.

Flashbacks reveal that his sociopathy is born from the systematic abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his sadistic grandmother who raised him after his mother abandoned him as an infant.

Gluing Lounds to a wheelchair, Dolarhyde forces him to recant the allegations on tape, bites off his lips and sets him on fire, leaving his maimed body outside his newspaper's offices.

As the full moon nears, an increasingly desperate Graham realizes that the killer knew the layout of his victims' houses from their home movies, which were developed at the same film processing lab.

During his recovery, Graham has a flashback to a visit he made to Shiloh, the site of a major battle in the American Civil War, shortly after apprehending (and in the process, killing) Garrett Hobbs, a serial killer he investigated before Hannibal Lecter.

As part of his research for the book he attended classes and talked to agents at the FBI Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia, during the late 1970s.

He compared the development of the story to the gradual acceleration of a powerful car, but complained that the explanation for Dolarhyde's behavior, trauma in his youth, was too mechanistic.

"[6] Dave Pringle reviewed Red Dragon for Imagine magazine, calling it "an excellent thriller about a man who murders whole families with the aid of his grandmother's false teeth (I kid not).