Darkly Dreaming Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay, was a Christmas present from my girlfriend, who knew I'd grown to be a massive fan of the show since discovering it around six months ago. I flew through the book, which was surprisingly short, but came out the other side feeling sorely disappointed that it didn't come close to living up to the TV series that it inspired.
My main issues are threefold:
a) Nothing happens! I appreciate that the TV series had to flesh out the story to 10 episodes, but they seem to have put in a lot of stuff that I was expecting to have come from the book, and so was disappointed to not find. With the novel being so short, there was no room for side-plots of any sort. Rita barely features at all, Dexter doesn't go on the journey to discover his past, and there's barely any of the cat-and-mouse mind game between Dexter and the killer that made the TV series so great. All the character except for Dexter himself are one-dimensional characatures, and novel-Dexter has none of the likeabilty that makes TV-Dexter so watchable despite his "hobby".
b) The killer doesn't appear until the last 15 or so pages, (most of which are given over to a long speech he makes before randomly killing a main character and disappearing. There's no tension in the scene, which ends abruptly with no closure offered.
c) Too many pages are given over to Dexter's dreams and their potential symbolism, and to his misplaced belief that he might be carrying out the murders himself in his sleep. I don't think it's because I already knew that this wasn't the case, that it felt like a waste of time having him muse so much on a possibilty that wasn't even close to plausible.
Knowing that I don't plan to ever read the subsequent books in the series, I went online to read some plot synopses and I couldn't believe what I found. Future plots include Dexter realising that Astor and Cody are potentially as screwed up as him and so training them to kill, the "Dark Passenger" being revealed as some sort of supernatural Old God, and a scene which combines the two, culminating in Astor killing the high priest of the cult of Moloch in an ancient underground temple. If you've watched the series but not read the books, you might think I'm making that up, but I assure you I'm not - the book series appears to have absolutely no grounding in reality.
Potentially the book might have been fine if read with no pre-conceptions, although apart from the central conceit of a serial-killer with a moral code, I can't say it has anything unique to say. If you, like me, are coming from the TV show and expecting this to be anything like a novelisation of Season 1, then don't say I didn't warn you. It's very different, has nowhere near the depth of story or character, and is just dull by comparison.
Stay away.
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