Darkly Dreaming Dexter

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www.dexter-books.com

Darkly Dreaming Dexter
Jeff Lindsay
2004

The Summary

Dexter Morgan is a blood spatter analyst for the Miami police department.  He's also a serial killer, a serial killer with a rigid rule that he never kills an innocent person.  Never.

But, now, Dexter has a problem.

Faced with a string of murders with striking similarities to his own style of disposing of victims, Dexter is confronted with the knowledge that someone knows about his extracurricular activities - and that someone may be him.

The Good

Darkly Dreaming Dexter is a unique novel in that it snares you with an interesting and dynamic character who is, in fact, a certified sociopath.  He's a murderer - granted, he's a murderer who only kills "bad guys" who slip through the system - and yet Jeff Lindsay gives you every reason to like his homicidal narrator.

Quirky, eloquent, and chillingly descriptive, Dexter Morgan is a fun narrator to follow.  I mean, he's obviously a bit off.  He's a killer with a Dark Passenger and a Need, so, of course, he's going to be different.  But Dexter is a surprisingly enjoyable narrator.

He does sometimes speak in the third person, and he has a habit of alliteration and grandiose internal musings, but that's just part and parcel of the whole package.  You get used to it.

The Bad

Although this may be an obvious observation, here it is:  Dexter is a broken individual.  Not for the obvious reasons, I should point out, like his uncontrollable desire to kill.

No, during the culmination of Lindsay's novel, Dexter frequently struggles to distinguish between reality and memory, fact and fantasy - and, as a witness to his thoughts and misadventures (as his extra "passenger"), that broken and disjointed perspective is eventually passed on to you, the reader.

While I can appreciate this gives Dexter's tale a dramatic twist and offers readers the opportunity to see what kind of emotional (?) and psychological stress Dexter suffers from, his insanity - his actual mental break-down - is sometimes difficult to read.  After reading pages and pages of an eloquent Dexter, it's a bit of a turn to meet a deteriorating Dexter.

The Ugly
Dexter Morgan is a sociopath.

We've established this, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that, as you read, you'll become intimately acquainted with his diabolical thoughts and, more to the point, be an eye-witness to the murders he commits.  There's blood and gore, and then more blood and gore.

And it isn't like the TV show.  The camera doesn't pan away at the precise moment Dexter begins to mutilate his victims.  You know what's coming, and you get to be audience to every brutal hack and slash Dexter commits.

Even if they are "bad guys" - even if you know they deserve this moment of so-called "justice" - you can't help but feel a little bad for the man or woman Dexter has set his sights on.