Nathan,
Re your comment below:
"I read the first book when it came out in mass market
paperback. It wasn't a bad book, but I didn't feel compelled
to buy the sequel, and I haven't had any interest in watching
the show. I think you're interest in Dexter as a character
will be directly proportional to you're interest in serial
killers. I tend to find them uninteresting."
Intersting you should say that. Fictionally, I think it's all
in the treatment, but what your post got me thinking about
was real life.
I'm on the Edgar true-crime committee this year, and one of
the books submitted for consideration was about Wichita's BTK
Killer.
Without comment on the quality of the book (which I'm not
allowed to do as a member of the committee), the thing that
struck me all through reading it was what a basically
uninteresting character BTK really was. He was a textbook
example of "the banality of evil."
The image we have, thank to novels and TV, is either of evil
geniuses, a la Hannibal Lector, or fearsome, almost
supernatural monsters like "Chaingang" in the novels of Rex
Miller or the various villains in Michale Slayde's Mountie
series.
But here was a guy, raised by decent people, who went on to
rais decent people himself, living what was a pretty dull
suburban life, who had this whole secret hobby that involved
breaking into people's homes and killing them. And rather
than being the result of child abuse, or twisted impulses
that he couldn't resist (because he DID resist them, for
years at a time), it was all just based on some trivial
fantasies he decided to act out.
Oddly, his very dullness made him that much more
frightening.
JIM DOHERTY
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