Recent reads

Darkly Dreaming Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay. A thriller with a protagonist as twisted as the enemies he pursues. Dexter, you see, is a psychopathic serial killer. But that's alright, sort of, because his stepfather, a retired cop, carefully trained him to submerge that side of his personality in everyday life and selectively direct it only at people who, in some way, deserve such treatment. Murderers, for example. Child rapists. And so forth. And since Dexter works in an urban police department, he has lots of targets to pick from, targets who would otherwise go unpunished for their wicked misdeeds.

Dexter also has difficulties with relationships, because as he constantly reminds the reader in first-person narration, he is totally incapable of feeling normal emotions like love or friendship. He's learned to fake it, and even has a girlfriend and a more-or-less normal-looking family relationship with his adoptive sister. But it's all based on observation and imitation of other people, not on actual feeling.

The plot thickens when a bevy of murder victims start showing up around the city, all killed in ways that seem oddly familiar to our twisted antihero. Is Dexter himself somehow involved without consciously knowing it? Or could there be someone else out there who shares his bizarre compulsions?

Dexter is a warped and disturbing character, but most readers will feel a degree of sympathy for him, not only because he narrates the book in a wryly self-deprecating fashion, fully aware of his own problems, but because most of us have had similar, if less extreme, feelings. Who has not, in the throes of some great upset, wished torment on another human being? The sane among us know to suppress those urges, but like Dexter, we feel them all the same. It's an exaggerated take on the old Freudian battle between the id and the superego.

Lindsay effectively develops his plot, with tension rising steadily as Dexter and his mysterious nemesis/alter ego inexorably converge upon each other. It's an effective one-shot thriller, but I question whether the scenario he's created can sustain a long series of books, let alone a TV show. One possible avenue for further development would be to explore the moral, emotional and psychological ramifications if the coldly-controlled Dexter were to accidentally choose an innocent person as victim. This could easily happen, even given his access to police files, given the number of convicted criminals who are eventually proven innocent. How could he, then, justify his own existence, if he no longer had the excuse that his victims "deserved it"?