Dexter in the Dark – No Peace for the Wicked…

Dexter in the Dark (2007) by Jeff Lindsay is the third in the series about Dexter Morgan, a Miami PD blood spatter analyst and serial killer.

Me, personally, I am a huge fan of the TV-series Dexter, starring the talented Michael C. Hall. It’s easy to hear the sinister voice-over so prevalent in the show while reading Lindsay’s prose. There’s a cheerful callousness to the narrative voice that really appeals to me, if for no other reason than the fact that it is unique in its consistency.

I picked up my copy more by accident than by design at a thrift shop for next to nothing, idly passing my time scanning the bins of books, as any good bibliophile would. I remember what I thought of the first novel, so I don’t think I would have gone out of my way to buy this one had not circumstance been conducive. But, it’s like that sometimes.

It’s a good read, fast paced and easy and darkly funny. My sense of humour is certainly dark enough to enjoy the inner monologue of the unrepentant and cheerfully psychopathic Dexter Morgan, a man who is essentially not a man, which he confidently points out frequently enough to remind the reader that is sort of the running theme.

Dexter is certainly the master of the art of camouflage. To the casual observer he is a successful blood-spatter analyst, a member of the police, an upstanding citizen about to get married to his long-term girlfriend Rita and be a father to her two children, Astor and Cody, from a previous marriage. All that is just hiding in plain sight. In reality he is a serial killer, a psychopath and more than a little dangerous.

The thing is, Dexter has this second inner voice he calls The Dark Passenger, supposedly brought on by the bloody trauma he suffered as a young boy. I have no problems thinking of the lust for blood like a second voice, a sort of guiding personification of his own fucked-up psyche, but Lindsay has chosen to make it literal. By the end of this novel Dexter’s Dark Passenger is a demon, and his adversary in this novel is a demon of higher rank and power. It is given voice in third person passages where IT speaks directly to the reader.

Again, you can wrangle yourself around the idea that Dexter has reified his bloodlust, given it a name, made it a constant companion, all that. It even makes sense to me, knowing a little about sociopathy and psychopathy. But when there is suddenly demons in the works, real actual King Solomon demons… I get a little disappointed. Everything I like about this particular narrative voice loses from that, in my humble opinion. And again I am struck by that same thought that I had when I read the first novel.

It’s stylish and funny and briskly dark and the main character is so intriguing in his own right that I am disappointed that the story doesn’t go somewhere more interesting. I like Dexter. I know that’s not entirely healthy, but then, this is fiction and that’s the premise. Lindsay does a good job with it, that unapologetic and completely solipsistic way of viewing the world is skewed enough that it will keep you interested through the 375 pages. But the story, the actual narrative arc itself, is surprisingly trite, mundane and requires more of a willing suspension of disbelief than I can give.

Why did they have to be demons? I’ve read my share… probably more than my share, of gothic and horror. I have no problem with monsters. I know many of them very well. It is the other side of Dexter, the lack of humanity, that interests me more. When Dexter searches for the proper human response to a situation things get really fascinating.

“It was difficult to think of anything clever or even socially acceptable to say to that. I had never read anywhere what to say to someone speaking of having feeling in his amputated hand. Chutsky seemed to feel the awkwardness, because he gave me a small dry snort of non-humorous amusement. “Hey, well”, he said, “there’s still a couple of kicks left in the old mule.” It seemed to me an unfortunate choice of words, since he was also missing his left foot, and any kicking at all seemed out of the question. Still, I was pleased to see him coming out of his depression, so it seemed like a good thing to agree with him.” (341-342)

See what I mean? That’s where things about Dexter are the most intriguing to me. I guess I’m just a little twisted that way.

Still, it’s funny if you like your humour dark. And it’s different. And that makes it worth the while to read it.

MULE

No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy at his terse best

No Country for Old Men (2005) by Cormac McCarthy stars off in medias res.

When Llwewllyn Moss is out hunting antelope near the Rio Grande he stumbles into the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. There is one man still barely alive who asks Moss for water. Moss does not have any. He searches the vehicles at the scene and finds heroin in one of them and a whole armoury’s worth of weapons. Off on a hill a little way away there is one more man, dead now, sitting there with a case full of money. Moss takes the money and goes back to his wife Carla Jean. During the night he suddenly gets an attack of conscience and thinks of the dying man’s request for water. He goes back to the site of the drug deal. That’s where things start going pear-shaped.

There are three main players in this novel. Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, also a veteran, but from a different war (World War II) and Anton Chigurh, a hitman.

Each of these men represent a different philosophical standpoint and a different set of values. Moss is a practical tactician, a man who has served in Vietnam as a sniper and he is opportunistic enough to take the drug money when he finds it, knowing all the while that it might end up being a very bad decision. Ed Tom, the Sheriff, has the perspective of a man that lived through the second world war and did reprehensible things during combat that still haunt him. He has seen the direction of the development of society and he finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile what he remembers from his youth with the reality he finds himself living in. His saving grace seems to be the undying love between him and his wife, that is where he finds his redemption and balm. Chigurh is a consummate sociopath, which means he has a deeply philosophical streak that does not stop him in the least from deciding a man’s fate (or a woman’s, for that matter) with a coin toss. There is no sense that he has a conscience in a conventional sense, but he has a code of conduct in a manner of speaking. Once he has accepted an assignment, there is nothing he won’t do to finish the job.

There are also levels of language in this triptych that reflect and enhance what goes on in the chain of events. The passages concerning Moss and Chigurh are mostly coolly descriptive and given in the third person. Dialogue is spare and very focused. McCarthy has an ear for the dialect of the Texas-region and shows a blatant disregard for punctuation and typical dialogue format that gives a heightened feeling of immediacy. The way the action is described makes this bare bones approach unrelenting and somehow makes the bloody violence of it worse.

I’ll give an example. This is the description of Moss trying to outrun pursuers in the desert.

“It was a long trek and he was still some two hundred yards from the river when he heard the truck. A raw gray light was breaking over the hills. When he looked back he could see the dust against the new skyline. Still the better part of a mile away. In the dawn quiet the sound of it no more sinister than a boat on a lake. Then he heard it downshift. He pulled the .45 from his belt so that he wouldn’t lose it and set out at a dead run. When he looked back again it had closed a good part of the distance.” (McCarthy, p. 31).

Chigurh brings all those horror movie Terminator machine killers to mind in his focus. He just keeps coming, no matter how his victims plead or fight back.

Sheriff Bell is given a reflective, almost poetic first person voice that talks calmly to the reader about his experiences and impressions.
This is what Bell’s voice sounds like;

“My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how an tell the truth. He said there was nothing to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not having to decide who you were. And if you done something wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Dont haul stuff around with you. I guess that all sounds pretty simple today. Even to me. All the more reason to think about it. He didn’t say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say.” (McCarthy, p. 249).

These literary techniques are dovetailed into each other seamlessly and with spare grace.

I reflected on quality of relentlessness in McCarthy’s novels The Road and Blood Meridian as well, the way lean, descriptive prose creates a forward momentum within the text itself as well as for me as a reader. It is probably a matter of me being unusually susceptible to this particular style, but for some reason the very sparseness makes the violence more gruesome for me personally, letting me use my imagination to fill in all that has not been said. I can look at what McCarthy does and take a step back and wonder how it is even possible that the effect can be as devastating as it is. It is a clear case of less being more.

The title for this novel is borrowed from William Butler Yeats poem ”Sailing to Byzanthium”, and there is some kind of weird gegenshein effect between the poem in lines like old men being like “a tattered coat upon a stick” in relation to the description of the old man Sheriff Bell visits and tells of his exploits in WWII.

Lean and terse though the prose might be, that does not mean it is in any way simple, or simplistic. There is no real nostalgia, no moral high ground, no easy solutions. I like the fact that something this terse can pack such a considerable punch and it really does something spectacular for those of us who can stand it.

Mule

Half is nowhere, Dexter… Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004) is the basis for the television series Dexter. We have the lead character Dexter Morgan whose inner monologue we are treated to as an interesting counterpoint to what is actually going on around him.

Dexter works as a forensic officer for the Miami Police. His area of expertise is concerning blood and blood spatter patterns, that kind of thing. Riding along behind Dexter’s slow boyish smile is the other persona he calls the Dark Passenger, a double, a separate part of his personality which has a distinct need – Dexter is a serial killer. What makes it all alright is the fact that he only hunts other serial killers. That is until the “ice truck killer” comes along and spoils the moral parameters that Dexter’s stepfather have set up. Within this framework Dexter is allowed to hunt and kill other killers, but he is not allowed to hurt the innocent and that’s exactly the temptation the “ice truck killer” offers.

There are all kinds of moral ambiguities you could argue out within this particular story, some of the more interesting ones concern the classical double standard of killing the killers, being judge-jury-and-executioner, is it still morally valid if you enjoy it too much and so on and so forth… Dexter describes himself as a monster. He means this in the way we sometimes hear psychopaths described, but the portrait is mostly about the surface. There is no deeper understanding of the psychopath’s inner workings – something you can find in for instance Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho (1991). The story itself if swift and enjoyable, the gore is not too gory and you will not be unnecessarily troubled by the fact that it is a first person narrative, since the voice is dry, witty and keeps a certain distance.

This is basically a slightly more twisted than usual detective story.

However – and this is a big however – the ending sucks. I wish there was a better expression for it but there it is, that’s what is does. The characters anagnorisis is a terrible disappointment to me at least since I have read sufficiently about psychopathy and sociopathy to recognise some of the basic patterns of character and see how these could have been developed in much more interesting ways. Dragging up a second dark double to double Dexter’s Dark Passenger (and feel free to hear Iggy Pop playing inside your head at this point – I definitely do) is interesting, but like any good horror movie proves – you don’t want to see the monster exposed in broad daylight. Suddenly all the darkness goes out of the story and it turns sentimental and you can see the masks on the performers in the rubber suits. And that’s exactly what you don’t want. I for one don’t care why Dexter feels the way he does. I don’t care why he has the need to kill. There are other much more interesting themes to develop.

This novel is polished and stylish, sure, but it lacks depth and is seems a little too polite. It’s too bad Jeff Lindsay chickened out and didn’t take it all the way.

Mule