Book Review: Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay

I'm a big fan of justice, and most of the time mere revenge is an adequate substitute. And while often times neither is possible in the real world, I love tales of justice and revenge in fiction. So it should come as no great surprise that I'm a fan of both incarnations of Dexter--the uber-graphic serial killer saga on Showtime and the series of novels that inspired it. The show is back, and appears to be diverging from the plot of the books (a good thing, since I spoiled the end of the first season for myself by reading the first novel). But the latest book in the series? Eh....not so much.

Oh, stylistically, not much has changed. Dexter is still a sharp, sarcastic, soulless sonuvabitch--Jeff Lindsay's still got the knack for writing the protagonist's inner standup comedy routine down cold. No, the problems here are all in the plot. Up until this point, the books have unfolded exclusively from Dexter's first-person narration. In the third installment, Lindsay experiments with interludes with the villain's (or is that villains' ?) from the third-person "omniscient narrator". This would work....except for the antagonist itself. Dexter has been compared to Batman before (and even refers to himself sarcastically as the Dark Knight this time around), but just like Batman, Dexter is a mere mortal, and likewise the foes he deals with. His "Dark Passenger" that drives him to kill and provides him with the insight to find the worst of society's predators for his victims, up until now treated as a mere psychotic trick of the mind, is now revealed to be something more, something supernatural and older than time, changing Dexter from a brilliant-yet-demented detective into a possessed-yet-still-in-control bystander, and moving the book's feel away from Batman and more towards a Spider-Man-with-the-symbiote-costume. All in all, a disappointing entry in the book series, recommended only to the most die-hard Dexter fans. Here's hoping Lindsay can get the series back to basics in the inevitable next volume.