Deeply Disappointing Dexter?

Don’t Jeff Lindsay’s “Dexter” titles remind you of those adult-movie-style titles like “Debbie Does Dallas”? No?

Anyhow, I finally got my hands on a copy of the third book in the Dexter series, Dexter in the Dark. I read it all in one afternoon; coincidentally, I had my very first coffee latte ever at one o’clock that same afternoon (and me a grad student – shocking, I know) and could not for the life of me fall asleep until one in the morning. Shut up, I don’t have caffeine much.

However, while reading Dexter, I thought about more than just coffee. (Spoilers for books two and three follow). See, I really liked the first two Dexter books. I started reading the second one, Dearly Devoted Dexter, an hour or so before my bedtime, and the “well, it won’t hurt to read just one more chapter”s continued until I was three-quarters done the book and way too freaked out by the villain to put it down until I could be sure that that guy was NOT COMING BACK. EVER. (No, check that: it wasn’t the villain himself that creeped me out; it was the stuff he did. The villain himself was kind of boring once Dexter actually met him. Anyway.) But this Dexter… well, though the narrative was still witty and smooth and easy to read, it just didn’t stir my interest as much as its predecessors.

Maybe part of this was the way the disappearance-of-the-Dark-Passenger plotline suddenly turned the whole series into a fantasy. Like, the tired old EVIL SPIRITS EXIST AND THEY ARE NOT HUMAN AND THEY DO ALL THE BAD THINGS EVER!!!! trope. Okay, Lindsay’s version is a little more complicated than that – Dark Passengers don’t attach themselves to humans unless its host already possesses an innate tendency toward violence, yada yada yada. But it still bugs me that what was, for me, the coolest part of this series – its deconstruction of the conventional notions of “good” and “evil” motivations – turned into a spooooooky legend about demonic ancient gods demanding human sacrifices.

 

 

Spoooooooooky!

 

In a way, Dexter embodies the thrill of the superhero/alter ego character: you get to watch him stalk all the bad people, pretending like he’s a weak, normal person, when you know that, really, when it comes to evil stuff, they are PWNED. Sort of like when someone makes fun of Clark Kent, and you’re all like, “If you only knew that he could X-ray vision through your underwear right now”. Except, instead of Clark Kent, it’s still Dexter Morgan, and, instead of “X-ray vision through your underwear”, it’s more like “disembowel you with a scalpel”.

 

Anyway, I did like how Lindsay introduced Dexter’s strangely feral paternal instincts toward Astor and Cody, the two kids whose mother he’s about to marry. (That poor woman – the rest of her family is entirely composed of serial killers. Actually, if she were a serial killer, too, that would kind of push the whole thing over the edge into a farce, don’t you think? Sort of like The Incredibles… but not. Or maybe a twenty-first-century Addams family.) The kids are kind of meh for me: I’m not sure I quite buy their precocious more-in-tune-with-their-Dark-Passengers-than-Dexter-ness. I gotta admit, though, you have to admire Lindsay’s mad plotting skillz: he can make a conversation between three emotionless sociopaths taut with drama.

 

And it was fun to see the hot-ice-and-wondrous-strange-snow drama of Dexter reeling over his newfound disgust at the mutilation of human bodies. However, I could definitely have done without all his moping over the abandonment of his Dark Passenger. It was like having to read the diary of an exceptionally insecure friend whose significant other just sent a “let’s be friends” email. Part of the fun of Dexter is how he isn’t concerned about other people liking him for who he is; how he’s inhumanly (and, therefore, all-too-humanly) resigned to the fact that he’s a monster, and there’s nothing he can do about it. I guess I wanted the Dark Passenger to be part of Dexter, because Dexter’s right to worry: without it, what makes him special? What makes him him? It would be like discovering that Superman and Clark Kent really are different people, or that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde really aren’t aspects of the same personality.

 

To be fair, part of the thrill of the first two Dexter books is the way Lindsay not only confronts Dexter with a problem to solve but also puts him on a personal journey of self-knowledge. In the first book, he has to confront a strange serial killer who seems to mirror his deepest inner self; in the second, he has to navigate his personal relationship with his foster-sister, figure out if he can “do” marriage, and form an uneasy alliance with his worst enemy, all at the same time. So I guess it’s reasonable for Lindsay to take the plot of the third book in this direction: how much of Dexter’s self is defined by his urge to kill? I’m just a little disappointed in the answer, is all.

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