DARKLY DREAMING DEXTER
by Jeff Lindsay
I wish I’d written this ...
... because it has one of the best protagonists in the thriller genre.
This novel is built around such a good idea—a serial killer who kills only bad people—that its faults almost slip by unnoticed. I wasn't too put out by the messy slump that is the middle section, I was able to enjoy the tell-not-show internal monologues, I wasn't bothered by the simplistic characters (all but Dexter himself), and the silly "mystical dream" nonsense didn’t do too much to spoil the story. Were the novel any longer, these shortcomings might have overwhelmed it, but Lindsay wisely kept it short, so you can breeze through it without feeling that its defects are stealing time better spent with a different book. It's darker and "more psychopathic" than the TV series, which I appreciated, and some of the problems can be attributed to the nature of the beast ... characters are shallow because Dexter, the narrator, has no depth perception. So a difficult balancing act for the author, and one that, in my opinion, Lindsay just about gets away with. For sure, I'll be reading the next in the series.
From the publisher
Meet Dexter Morgan, a polite wolf in sheep's clothing. He's handsome and charming, but something in his past has made him abide by a different set of rules. He's a serial killer whose one golden rule makes him immensely likeable: he only kills bad people. And his job as a blood splatter expert for the Miami police department puts him in the perfect position to identify his victims. But when a series of brutal murders bearing a striking similarity to his own style start turning up, Dexter is caught between being flattered and being frightened—of himself or some other fiend.
