In one of his funnier essays, included in the collection The War Against Cliché, Martin Amis launched a leisurely assault on the novelist Thomas Harris for his abortive latest installment of the Hannibal Lecter series, Hannibal. The author had lost it, developing a laughable romantic infatuation with his cannibal creation. He’d “gone gay” for Lecter, Amis cackled. (Amis was fond of gay jokes: witness the fun he had at the expense of Robert Bly’s masculinist manifesto Iron John, when he realized that “iron” was rhyming slang for “poof.”)
