DEXTER IN THE DARK
Jeff Lindsay
Doubleday
Mystery
ISBN: 9780385518338

When you think serial-killer mysteries, you probably imagine something along the lines of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS or the new novel HEARTSICK--- seriously grisly, psychologically twisted stuff that’s best read by daylight. You don’t imagine stories about a good-looking guy who lives in Miami, works for the police department as a blood specialist, owns a boat and has both a pretty divorced-mom girlfriend and an incredibly sardonic wit. “So on a night like many others,” Dexter tells us, “when the moon flung down chords of manic melody onto its happily bloodthirsty children, I was humming along and preparing to go out for a sharp frolic” (the author loves alliteration --- perhaps a bit too much --- and puns; “pointed comments” abound when discussing Dex’s passion for human vivisection).

If you’ve read the first two Dexter books, or have seen the Showtime drama (to which I am hopelessly addicted), you are already familiar not only with the snappy narrative voice but also with the fascinating premise of the series, which, for the benefit of newcomers, I’ll restate here. Dex, after a traumatic childhood, was taken in by a cop (the sainted Harry). When he showed early homicidal tendencies, his remarkable foster father taught him three crucial things: how to channel his psychopathic energies into reprisals against murderers who have gone unpunished by the official forces of order; how to pass for a normal person with feelings; and, most important, how not to get caught.

So Dexter grows up to make a killing, so to speak (this pun thing must be catching), and again Lindsay surprises us by supplying a bright, buzzy setting that plays against the horrific nature of his hero’s secret inclinations. Instead of bleak, creepy urban streets, we have Miami, getaway capital of the USA: the heat, the beat, the frantic traffic (“You just have to relax and enjoy the violence”), the soul-stirring food (Cuban steak sandwiches, fried plantains, mango milkshakes). This is local color with a vengeance.
 
Equally ironic is Dexter’s personal situation, which feels a little like a ghoulish sitcom. Somehow he has become engaged to his girlfriend Rita, she of the abusive ex-husband and two small kids, and he is suffering all the pre-wedding slapstick that men in a TV comedy series typically endure --- picking the music, meeting the minister, hiring the caterer. The funny thing is that when Dexter’s lack of real emotion leaves him stumped about what to do next, he often thinks of movies or television shows, and the scripts show him how to act properly (“I quickly changed course, diving straight into tactics learned from pretending to be human for so many years. ‘Rita,’ I said, ‘the important part of the wedding is when I slip the ring on your finger. I don’t care what we eat afterward.’”).

With the kids, though, faking is useless, because they --- especially the little boy --- appear to have dark inner selves of their own and have outed Dexter almost immediately (it takes one to know one). He soon realizes that his stepfather role will be more “The Addams Family” than “Father Knows Best”; Harry, not Rita, will be his best guide for how to bring these children up --- not by denying that they have murderous inclinations but by displacing these impulses from the neighborhood cat or bully to somebody who really deserves to die. And during all this, poor Rita --- prattling away about the wedding --- doesn’t have a clue. (Lindsay, I think, makes her a bit too credulous.)

That’s because Dexter’s real soul mate isn’t his fiancée but his Dark Passenger --- his name for the creepy inner self, the “id monster” who inhabits him, drives him, empowers him, makes him who he is. (Lindsay likes to play satirically with the clichés of self-acceptance and self-knowledge.) The signal event of DEXTER IN THE DARK is the sudden disappearance of this private voice, leaving Dexter unknowable even to himself. He feels lobotomized rather than liberated. And now the bad guys are pursuing him, not the other way around: “Is this what it was like to be human?” he asks himself. “To walk through life with the perpetual feeling that you were meat on the hoof, stumbling down the game trail with tigers sniffing at your heels?” There is a great chase sequence in which Dexter turns the table on a car that has been shadowing him and does battle with the forces of evil.

Which are…? Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention that this is a mystery, not a black comedy or French existentialist novel. There is a typically bizarre unsolved case: headless corpses that have been somehow…baked. Dexter’s foster sister, Deborah, a homicide detective with the Miami police, is in charge, and when it comes to ritualistic serial killings she is accustomed to relying on her foster brother’s peculiarly accurate instincts. Dexter, however, is coming up empty because, natch, it’s the Dark Passenger who always had these insights, and the DP’s desertion happened right around the time the first victims were discovered. And the same…force, for want of a better word (here we get a touch of the sort of Ancient Evil stuff made popular by THE DA VINCI CODE and THE HISTORIAN), that scared away the DP and is responsible for the weird murders is also stalking Dexter and his soon-to-be new family.

The only problem with the series is that I’m substantially more engaged by Dexter himself, his warped and ever-evolving psyche, than by the whodunit aspect per se. The real tension is how long our gay blade can go on masquerading as an ordinary dullard. Will he actually get married (“a quantum leap forward, onto a new level of human camouflage”)? Will his stepchildren follow in his (bloody) footsteps? Will Rita ever get wise? Stay tuned.

   --- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

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