Books of 2024: Week 29 - Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Danse Macabre

Dexter and King.

DARKLY DREAMING DEXTER by Jeff Lindsay

After finally catching up with the first season of the Showtime series Dexter eighteen years after it first aired, I felt I should see how it all began by going back to the source material: author Jeff Lindsay’s 2004 novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter. This is where the world was first introduced to Dexter Morgan, a forensic blood spatter analyst for the Miami Police Department who also happens to be a serial killer on the side... But, taking the advice of his late foster father Harry (who was a detective on the Miami PD), Dexter only targets victims who are murderers themselves. He doesn’t harm the innocent.

Dexter’s sister Deborah also works for the Miami PD, and when the story begins she’s working vice – but she gets her chance to move over to homicide when a killer nicknamed the Tamiami Slasher starts killing prostitutes, draining their corpses of blood, and dumping their body parts around the city. We’re not very deep into the book before it becomes clear that the killer knows who Dexter is and knows about his own serial killing activities, kicking off an interesting game of cat and mouse.

Reading Darkly Dreaming Dexter, I found that Lindsay not only has an occasionally irritating passion for alliteration (as you can tell by the title), but also that the first season of the Showtime series was a great adaptation of this novel. The show kept all of the important events from the book while building out the story in a major way so it could sustain twelve episodes. I was also surprised to see how little actually happens in the book... Some of the best things about the first season of Dexter were created for the show and can’t be found in the pages of Lindsay’s novel. This is actually a short and simple story that could have been brought to the screen in two hours rather than twelve episodes – but a feature-length, direct adaptation wouldn’t have been as good or as memorable as the expanded adaptation that was made for Showtime.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter is a good read. A well-told serial killer story. But if you pick it up after watching the first season of the TV show, you might find it underwhelming in comparison to what you saw on the screen.

DANSE MACABRE by Stephen King

I didn’t witness my father reading a lot of books in his life, his reading mostly consisted of Newsweek and magazines about trucks and farming equipment. But when I did see him read a book, it was usually one written by Stephen King, with one of his big accomplishments being that he actually made it all the way through the 1000-plus pages of King’s It. Another King novel I saw him reading was the 1981 non-fiction book Danse Macabre... and I can’t imagine that he ever finished this one. Danse Macabre was the result when King was asked to write a book about the horror phenomenon and decided to restrict the scope to “the last thirty years or so,” or from 1950 to 1981, occasionally branching out to reference something older.

My father had a copy of this book in his possession when I was very young. I didn’t attempt to read it at the time, but I remember leafing through it – and specifically recall that my first exposure to the George A. Romero classic Night of the Living Dead, which would later become one my favorite movies and the movie have watched more than any other, was not through a late night TV showing, but through an image from the movie that’s included in the pages of Danse Macabre.

The reason why I suspect my father never finished this book is because he was never known to be a horror fan. He only agreed to watch a horror movie with me on a handful of occasions, otherwise he would just brush them off as boring trash... Although now, seven years after he passed away, I think the reason he didn’t like to watch horror is because he was scared by horror movies, and he was the tough guy type who wouldn’t be able to admit to such a thing. Given how reactive he was while watching movies of other genres, it makes sense that horror would get to him. But this is only a book for people who have a strong interest in the genre... and even then, they might not want to read King ramble on about horror subjects for hundreds of pages.

Horror is my favorite genre, writing about horror is my job, and even I found Danse Macabre to be tough to get through. King goes over movies, TVs, and books at length – with his passion really shining through, of course, when he gets to the book section. He has been accused, at times, of having Diarrhea of the Word Processor, and I would say that he demonstrates that affliction at various points in this book, going about a bit too long about some subjects. Evaluating pieces of entertainment, he states opinions as fact and waffles back and forth between sounding like a down-home fan and a pretentious snob, not holding back when he wants to insult somebody. Not even his fellow authors are safe from offensive zingers.

I love horror, but I didn’t love reading King’s writing on it, especially not for so many pages. This is a book I might enjoy more if I go back to it someday and take some time away from it between each chapter.

Nearly thirty years after Danse Macabre was first published, King went back and wrote a new foreword for it, talking about some of the horror movies he had really enjoyed since he finished the book. So if you get that later edition, you get some extra pages.