And of course you can count on me to read said creepy old men’s creepy books. This time I read Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff LIndsay who I suppose is more of a middle aged man than an old man if you want to get into it. You might be familiar with it because it was turned into a TV series called simply Dexter in the United States starring Michael C. Hall, who is otherwise best known for another TV series Six Feet Under, in the title role. I myself have not seen the Dexter TV adaptation but I have seen some of Six Feet Under, which consistently seemed to decompose just like the corpses in the funeral home that the show revolved around. Hall’s acting was always spot on though.
I have been lead to understand by way of a massive plot spoiler that the first season of the show follows this first Dexter novel before branching off to an original story for the second season. This strikes me as a good move since the release pace is different between the show and the novels and of course the show can always adapt to the plot of the other novels at a later point. But mostly I like that just because I always complain about how boring it is for an adaptation to be merely a different media’s version of the same thing. So though I can not draw a conclusion until I see the show, reading the novel gives me the feeling that the presentation of the show would be better.
The thing is that there must be an unwritten rule stating that stories about people who are supposed to be deranged, perverted, or depraved must be in a semi-journal style first person narrative in which the main character refers to themselves in the third person. The first such book I recall reading like that was Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and every book of this type I’ve read since then always reminds me of that. Now Lolita is a particularly rambling story and darkly dreaming dexter is a bit more to the point and quite a smooth read (I might have read it in under 5 hours) but Dexter always refers to himself in his thoughts as Dexter, often something dexter such as the titular “darkly dreaming dexter”, questions his sanity, reflects upon his strangeness and what he needs to do to go unnoticed while fulfilling his desires, and so on. It’s actually somewhat of a disaster. I don’t remember if I’ve said before that the best way to cover up being a bad writer is to have a bizarre story but it is certainly one way to try.
And Jeff Lindsay (which is a pen name) is not a good writer. He must have a certain amount of cleverness because a fair amount of people have been tricked into thinking that he is, but I assure you that he is not. First of all he is extremely out of touch. He disguises this by throwing out pointless lingo, occasional bits of spanish, and geographical locations without any explanation as to their meaning or significance in order to appear hip (I am using the word hip to be ironic although pointing that out is moronic). Other than that events and interactions in the book are terribly inconsistent. One would not pay much attention to them because of the pace of the book but eventually you get to the end and realize that it doesn’t all add up. Speaking of which {plot spoiler} you get a sort of vague ending right at the climax of the book which is also a really cheap technique to establish a novel series although I suspect that was incidental. It has been established that I am not much for literary subtlety, perhaps to the point of being thick, but even keeping my standards in mind the ending is frustrating. One chapter you don’t know who is going to make it out alive and the next chapter everything is over. {end of spoilers for now} Other than the ending though, it’s somewhat hard to believe that Dexter would have been able to get away with killing as many people as he apparently has considering how obvious the ways he goes after some of them are. In particular when the story of his first kill target was related, it seems to me like it would have at least been obvious to his foster sister that he had killed that person.
So in conclusion I have to say that this is a shitty book, it’s almost impossible to imagine that latter books are better, but it is pretty interesting even though it only has a couple of quirks that make it stand out from similar fiction. To summarize the plot you have a specialized crime scene investigator who is a vigilante serial killer, in particular he seems to kill other serial killers which seems like a bit of a stretch to me, and in the course of the story he is trying to track down another killer who intrigues him but he’s not sure why that is or what he wants to do when he finds the killer. All of which are things that have been done a fair amount but not before in that exact combination, a serial killer involved with law enforcement is a pretty common story though. Then again it makes sense that if you’re investigating your own murders they would be easier to get away with. The main quirk of the story is that he was actually encouraged to become a serial killing vigilante by his foster father who was a decorated police detective that had apparently become extremely cynical by the time Dexter’s nature was apparent. And so it was decided that if there was no way to get around Dexter wanting to kill people, he could at least kill people “who deserve it”. The line of thought is common among serial killers as far as I know, although more often killers consider others worthy of death on the basis of personal affront as opposed to actual crimes against society. Another thing that’s interesting is how petty the police officers in the story are portrayed as being. It is very likely that Dexter would have been exposed or killed had it not been for this quality. I mentioned what seemed to me like the accuracy of representation of process (that being that no one just figures shit out, that the crimes are solved by running everything down systematically, the alliance of society against criminals, and “getting lucky”) among police officers in the works of Mo Hayder being interesting to me and this has a similar feel to it. Although there is not a whole lot of policing in this story there is a lot of “not policing” like when a detective brings in reporters to a crime scene that hasn’t been processed yet in an attempt to cover her ass after it becomes obvious that she has botched things by arresting the wrong person and therein closing the case.
Well anyway, so saying that the book is shit I plan to read the others when I get the chance because the story intrigues me even if the method of its delivery is less than ideal. I must say though that after my recent rash of books about the worst parts of humanity I’m getting a bit tired of them though. I can only read so many shitty books where fucked up things happen you know? Well I’ve got a pile of light novels and anime sitting around so maybe I’ll go to that for a little while… after the 2nd Dexter book anyway. One unexpected thing about the story is that it has inspired me again to write (whether I will or not) and create some music. There was a particular beat that was running through my head when reading the story and though I seem to recognize it as being from an old video game it is persistent enough that if I had or knew how to use a synthesizer I would bang it out. Until that time.
By the way it occurs to me that I haven’t gone through a day in my life in quite some time in which I didn’t at least hear about death. Whether it be from the news, an acquaintance, an event, or a work of fiction. Perhaps there are in fact no such days when there are so many people in the world. But in particular I’m not sure that I’ve known a day without violence for a long time now. Perhaps the violence is not serious, but almost every day I seem to check out some crime procedural or another. And perhaps that isn’t a good thing. I would speculate that it was the things that happened in my youth that made me so accepting of death to the point of being numb to the concept but my hobby of murder mystery fiction can’t help anything. I probably won’t take a break from “a death a day” though, if only because I’ve gone this far with it.
