|  Book 4: Darkly Dreaming Dexter
Writer: Jeff Lindsay
Genre: Science Fiction
Number of pages: 288
Read This Year: 1190
My rating of the book, F- [worst] to A [best]: B+
My Thoughts: I have not, as of this writing, seen any episodes of Showtime's Dexter series. I believe I have a perfectly reasonable explanation, however: I don't get Showtime. However, after hearing so many people talking about how good it was, I got curious. This is the reason I read roughly 50 percent of the books I read -- I hear other people talking about them and I want to see what all the fuss is about. This is probably the only thing Dexter Morgan has in common with Harry Potter.
In Darkly Dreaming Dexter, we are introduced to Dexter Morgan, a Miami PD blood spatter specialist with a rather horrific hobby: he's a serial killer. As a child, he suffered some sort of unspecified trauma which left him without a conscience, without emotion, without any sort of inner soul. In fact, the only thing inside Dexter is his "Dark Passenger," a voice which compels him to kill. At a young age, his foster father realized Dexter's secret, and -- knowing he couldn't stop him from killing -- decided to try to guide him. Dexter, you see, is a serial killer who only kills bad people. He trails his victims, ensures himself of their guilt of their own bloody crimes, and takes a sort of macabre vengeance. But now a new killer is stalking Miami, someone whose methods are disturbingly similar to his own, and Dexter is caught between an admiration for this new fiend's work and a desire to trace him down.
Dexter is really a unique protagonist. As a first-person narrator he's somewhat unrelatable, constantly reminding us of his own darkness and inhumanity... yet somehow, he manages to charm us as well as he does the people around him, most of whom are utterly oblivious that there's something different about him. There's absolutely nothing heroic about him, either. Some may be tempted to compare him to other killers-of-killers like Marvel Comics' Punisher, but that isn't an apt comparison. The Punisher is driven by an unquenchable thirst for revenge, a desire to snuff out all evil in a vain attempt to redeem the death of his family. Dexter has no such deep motivation for targeting murderers. He simply needs to kill SOMEONE, and was convinced by his father that it would be wiser to hunt down the people who "deserve" it than innocent victims.
The other characters in the book aren't quite as interesting. There are three main women, all stereotypes: the political-minded, bumbling detective; Dexter's hard-nosed cop sister; and Dexter's traumatized, closeted "girlfriend" are all somewhat two-dimensional. The other men get even less "page time." Besides Dexter, in fact, the most developed character is the other killer, who we don't see until the climax of the book. The climax is a little weak too, a real deus ex machina. The killer hinges on something from the backstory that was never even really hinted at until that point, except for vague rumblings about some childhood trauma Dexter couldn't remember.
While there are some weaknesses, the main character is intriguing enough to make me want to read the rest of the series and recommend this volume. Not great, but good enough to keep me reading.
Up Next: Shadow of the Giant by Orson Scott Card |
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blakemp's journal
Now.....do I like the show? Yeah...but no. I love the people, the characters, the plotline, the concept, the writing....but I don't do dismemberment. I'm hoping CBS will have taken some of it out. I'd also like to read the books when he's done.
--Aimée