Summer Reading: The ‘Dexter’ Series by Jeff Lindsay

The first time I picked up Darkly Dreaming Dexter (Dexter #1) by Jeff Lindsay I hated it. I had just finished season two of the amazing Showtime hit  and couldn’t wait for season three to get started – so I needed my Dexter fix. I ended up being so frustrated though because right from the start you can’t help but to notice that the book Dexter is not the same Dexter that Michael C. Hall portrays in the television series. The book Dexter is much colder, if possible, but at the same time more playful – displaying a more wry humor in his first-person narrative than what is written for Hall. And then there are major character shake-ups and a few character deaths that are drastically different from the show – Drastically Different Dexter if you will.

So I finished the book, threw it down, and thought I would never attempt to re-visit the original world of Dexter again.

However a completely unrelated thing happened that changed my perspective on cross media interpretations of material and that eventually led me back to giving the Dexter series another try. What happened was that I got into reading comics from the big two comic universes. A fan of Batman, for example, has to have endless patience when reading comics because DC and the writer responsible for the current story under a particular title of Batman may re-envision everything from the origin of characters to the time in history that the action takes place. It can be confusing and, for someone naturally anal like me, annoying to have to keep track of so many arcs.

Once I got used to the concept, though, I was able to enjoy a myriad of titles even though things didn’t match up one way or another to a particular detail that I liked in a book I read earlier. That liberation has allowed me to give Lindsay’s Dexter another try while understanding that it is the opportunity to have a lot of new material from the character even if it didn’t match up perfectly with my own preferences which were established by the television series.

And it worked. I’ve enjoyed the heck out of books two and three in Lindsay’s series and appreciate that the characters, motivations, and events are the inspiration of the television show, but are also so uniquely different that it is like watching parallel universes where much is the same, but even more exists in a kind of bizarro world.

As I wrote above, the book Dexter is a more playful and a bit of a smart ass. He’s a schmoozer to an almost creepy degree (which actually makes the Doakes sub-plot work a little better than in the television series) and narrates with an almost tongue-in-cheek style. At the same time, Linday’s Dexter voice brings home the fact that the guy is a sociopath. For one thing Dexter’s internal speech patterns involve a lot of alliteration. I don’t know if that is something attributed to sociopaths, but it makes the psyche of the Dexter in the book seem more unstable. The alliteration usually manifests with Ds and commonly will involve Dex talking about himself in the third person: The Dark Passenger awaits for Dashing Dexter for the planned Daring-Do.

Dexter in the tv series talks a lot about his inability to feel anything for Rita (his girlfriend) or Deb (his foster sister), but Hall’s performance always leaves a gray area where the viewer never completely believes that. In the book series, however, there is no questioning Dexter’s state of mind. Rita is viewed as an asset for his disguise and it is almost like Dexter holds her in contempt. Deb gets off a little easier, but only that he tries to fake being more normal just enough to keep her from having hurt feelings. And he does value her usefulness.

Jeff Lindsay’s written Dexter series is a lot of fun and gives fans of the character more adventures to pass the time. If anything Dexter is more twisted while at the same time the plots are less complex than the television counterpart. The Dexter series is definitely a worth while summer book. Just don’t get blood in the sand!