Here are 10 things I thought while reading Dexter by Design, the fourth novel featuring the world's most beloved serial killer, just as the fourth season of the as-beloved TV series is set to begin tomorrow.
1. Avoid Florida like the plague. It seems populated mainly by serial killers and their victims, who may be other serial killers – thus providing Dexter an endless stream of prey for what he calls his Dark Passenger – or tourists and locals of dubious reputation and worse taste. And some of the murders in this novel are a grotesque anti-touristic farce, the killers eviscerating bodies and replacing innards with things like piles of fruit or chilled bottles of beer.
Dexter By Design, by Jeff Lindsay, Doubleday, 285 pages, $29.95
2. Jeff Lindsay, like other writers whose serial killers inhabit more than one novel, sometimes goes off the deep end. (I'm talking about you, Thomas Harris, and how you transformed Hannibal Lector into a good guy, of sorts.) In Lindsay's previous novel, Dexter in the Dark, he suggests that Astor and Cody, the abused-by-their-father children of Dexter's “romantic” interest Rita, are Dexters-in-training. That dubious conceit is much extended in the new novel.
3. Again like Harris, Lindsay grows overfond of his murderous hero. The difference of course, is that Hannibal began as plain evil and Dexter's evil is muted by the teachings of his late adoptive cop-father, Harry. Also, Hannibal is a genius; Dexter is simply highly intelligent.
4. But he's less intelligent in this novel, often having difficulty explaining his way out of situations when confronted by a suspicious cop who finds him in a place he has no obvious reason to be. Dexter Dumbed Down.
5. Lindsay can be a very funny writer, but with a sometimes wavering sense of grammar: On page 142, he confuses “me” and “I.” On page 145, it's “was” and “were,” though in both cases the correct version would sound fussy.
6. American literary killers love to play games. All the other monsters Dexter confronts are fond of strewing complex clues about. So Lindsay likes games as well. Of course, Dexter's opponent here is not an American.
7. In fact, he's Canadian, and Montreal is Canada's Florida when it comes to killers. The true bad guy in Dexter by Design is one Brandon Weiss, from Montreal (his Canadianness figures cleverly in the plot at one point). Kathy Reichs has also produced Montreal-based villains.
8. Dexter has a strong sense of responsibility, faithfully observing Harry's code (kill only killers) and duty to the psychopathic tykes who are now his stepchildren, since he's married Rita.
9. Dexter the TV show is less outlandish than Dexter the novels. For instance, so far, TV Dexter shows no sign of incorporating Rita's kids into the life monstrous.
10. Given the series' alliterative titles, I wonder what the final entry in the series will be, as in John Updike's tetralogy-capping Rabbit at Rest. Perhaps Drastically Deleted Dexter?
Martin Levin is Books editor of The Globe and Mail. He is very relieved that 88 per cent of serial killers are strictly fictional.
