I n his “perfectly natural history” of cannibalism, the zoologist Bill Schutt takes until page one to reference Hannibal Lecter eating a census-taker’s liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone. Lecter might be literature’s most famous serial killer; he is without doubt its most famous cannibal. Lecter’s creator, Thomas Harris, recently published Cari Mora – his first novel in 13 years, and his first in 44 years not to feature the character made famous by an unblinking, enunciating Anthony Hopkins. And yet: despite Lecter’s absence in Cari Mora, the cannibalism persists. We meet Mr Imran, “a large, impassive man with a cauliflower ear”. A character recalls that Imran is “a biter”, and “could not always help it”. At the end of the chapter, sat in his car, Imran eats a human kidney, raw.

Lecter is absent, and yet here he lingers, a ghost at the cannibal feast. Why? Why can’t Harris help but include a glimpse of this dark appetite? Because at the core of Harris’s hugely popular horror fiction has always been a vision of the cosmos as fundamentally self-devouring. As Schutt outlines, cannibalism occurs across “the entire animal kingdom”.