“Beautifully written… the webs of imagery that Harris has so carefully woven… contains writing of which our best writers would be proud… there is not a singly ugly or dead sentence…' - or so sang the critics. Hannibal is a genre novel, and all genre novels contain dead sentences - unless you feel the throb of life in such periods as 'Tommaso put the lid back on the cooler' or 'Eric Pickford answered' or 'Pazzi worked like a man possessed' or 'Margot laughed in spite of herself' or 'Bob Sneed broke the silence.' What these commentators must be thinking of, I suppose, are the bits when Harris goes all blubbery and portentous (every other phrase a spare tyre), or when, with a fugitive poeticism, he swoons us to a dying fall: 'Starling looked for a moment through the wall, past the wall, out to forever and composed herself…' 'It seemed forever ago…' 'He looked deep, deep into her eyes…' 'His dark eyes held her whole…' Needless to say, Harris has become a serial murderer of English sentences, and Hannibal is a necropolis of prose.”

Source: The Well of Lost Plots

"Elizabeth Hand on Mortal Love at HarperCollins (2004)

Source: Writing for Social Scientists (1986), p. 70.

1960s

Sam Harris, Reply to a Christian http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=sharris_26_4 (May 2006)
2000s

interview with 3am http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2003/feb/interview_china_mieville.html

"The Mustard magazine interview" (January 2005)
Context: Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.

Stephen King, in Matthew Lewis The Monk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. vi.
Criticism

Source: The Names (1982), Ch. 4