Dexter Is Delicious

There's something deeply satisfying about returning to this series and finding it still delivers that perfect blend of wry humor, darkness, and clever writing. The whole book operates in this space between suburban normalcy and absolute horror, like if Norman Rockwell painted a nice family dinner but you knew something was deeply wrong with what was being served.

What really got me this time around was watching Dexter fall hopelessly in love with his daughter. It's such a fascinating angle because here's this guy with his "Dark Passenger" who supposedly can't feel real emotions, and suddenly he's completely undone by a baby. The series has always played with the sympathetic serial killer trope. After all, Dexter only kills bad people, show more follows a code, lives a double life as a forensic analyst... but adding fatherhood to the mix pushes him into genuinely new territory. He's becoming a much more complex character, and I'm here for all of it.

The prose has this darkly poetic quality. There's a lot of theater of the absurd content here, which keeps things from getting too grim. The book really is a black comedy at its core. Lindsay makes Dexter funny and ironic, stirring in a good measure of the ridiculous so readers don't get completely turned off by the fact that our protagonist is, you know, a killer.

If you thought the Dexter books were getting formulaic, this one genuinely feels different. Dexter's going down a whole new, confused and conflicted path, and watching him navigate fatherhood while hunting cannibals is both absurd and strangely touching. The cult horror elements add another layer to the usual cat-and-mouse investigation, and there's this fish-out-of-water quality to seeing a hardened killer struggle with diaper changes and protective instincts.

What I love most is that Lindsay never loses sight of what makes Dexter work as a character. He's insightful, clever, and genuinely likeable even when he's doing terrible things. The book maintains that delicate balance between making you root for him and reminding you that he's fundamentally not quite human. Watching him grapple with emotions he didn't think he could feel adds a vulnerability that makes the whole thing even more compelling. It's dark, funny, well-written, and it gave me exactly what I want from this series. show less

Where the last installment of the wacky adventures of my favorite sociopath left me cold and worrying that Jeff Lindsay might have lost his edge, my faith in Lindsay and his lovable serial killer has been completely restored with Dexter is Delicious.

This book is all about family. Dexter is a new father and he daydreams about how wonderful life will be for his new baby girl. He believes that he is feeling real human emotions and now understands what love is all about. He decides that the only way to be the best Dex Daddy he can be is to banish the Dark Passenger and give up his special playtime forever. He impresses on his step-children, fledgling sociopaths themselves, that their path is no longer the right one and that he will no show more longer tutor them to follow Harry's Code.

When his sister pulls him into a search for 2 missing teenagers, Dexter's world goes a bit wonky as the bones of one of the girls are found in a fire pit., well gnawed. Even as he dreams of hearts and flowers for little Lily Anne, it becomes clear that cannibals are alive and well in Miami. Deborah is determined to find and rescue the second girl. She relies on Dexter's expertise in darkness to help her in her search. To complicate matters, someone from Dexter's past has returned... and Dex Daddy isn't exactly thrilled.

Moving along at a brisk pace, Dexter is Delicious is a tasty and satisfying roller coaster ride. If you have enjoyed the tales of Dexter Morgan, you'll love this one. show less

Dexter's wife has just had a baby and something odd is happening to everyone's favorite monster. Dexter is starting to have... feelings. Suddenly, he's beginning to doubt his most basic instincts. With his beautiful baby in his arms it's hard to believe the world isn't a beautiful place. But something quickly comes along at work to prove him wrong. It seems a cannibalistic cult has moved into Miami and has started eating beautiful young co-eds. One girl is dead and another has been abducted and if Dexter doesn't hurry the body count will continue to rise. To make matters ever more sticky, Dexter's brother has returned and inserted himself into the family structure. How will Dexter ever teach his two step-kids to to love the light with show more Brian's dark influence dropping in from time to time?

Ah, Mr. Lindsay has returned with all his tedious writing habits. Debra does nothing but swear and make incompetent decisions. Cody struggles to string together two words. Aster is perpetually bratty. Rita refuses to finish a sentence. And Dexter talks enough to make up for everyone. Dexter's inner monologue is dementedly repetitive and eternally wrong. The number of times Dexter goes on a long tangent about how he's doomed only to immediately be saved would be laughable if it weren't so boring by now.

Debra's useless, limbless boyfriend shows up again and once again manages to get himself instantly captured by the bad guys even though he's got an assault rifle. The book goes to great lengths to tell us what a "super-spy" this guy is. He's spent a life in espionage and knows untold government secrets but he can't even go ten seconds without screwing up. It would also be comedic if it wasn't so stale at this point. Oh yeah, Debra's new partner dies almost instantly. You'd think the department would be starting to wonder by now. I honestly don't know how both Debra and Dexter haven't been fired. Dexter doesn't seem to have any assigned tasks other than following Debra around and doing her job for her. And Debra is a ridiculously loose cannon. She seems to have no grasp of police procedure. She also seems like she hasn't watched any crimes scene investigation shows. She honestly acts like it's her first day on the job every day. Also, it was obvious from the first chapter that she's pregnant. How dare Mr. Lindsay pretend it's a twist ending. That's insulting. show less

I suggested in my review of Dexter by Design that this series seemed to be played out – a result, perhaps, of an unsustainable character (a serial killer who only kills bad guys) or of the huge success on a premium cable channel of a television series based on the books. Given that opinion then, I don’t know why I bothered to pick up Dexter Is Delicious. This book only confirms that author Lindsay needs to find something different to write about, because Dexter is no longer funny, interesting or even particularly horrifying.

The plot is as outlandish as it has been in the last two books. There are cannibals loose in Miami who are kidnapping young women and making dinner out of them. More than that, they are apparently finding willing show more victims: women whose only sexual fantasy has been to be roasted and eaten. While I’m willing to grant that the limits of human depravity and mental illness are far beyond anything I might consider normal, and notwithstanding Robinson Jeffers’s lovely poem Vulture, I found this way too much to be believable. I may read a lot of horror and fantasy, but there are limits that surpass even my power to suspend disbelief. A desire to be spitted, hung over a fire, and cut away a bit at a time? Really? Does such a psychological illness actually exist? And could two young women in the same community share this illness?

Unable to stomach the premise (pun intended), I found the rest of the book pretty hard to take. Dexter is dragged around Miami by his sister, who commandeers him to accompany her on her investigative rounds. It’s hard to believe that the Miami police department would countenance Deb’s refusal to work with her partner, or her monopolization of a blood splatter specialist who ought to be in the laboratory, not illegally entering the lair of a suspect. It’s even harder to believe that Deb has some of the hard breaks she has in this book, or reaches the conclusions about criminals that she does. And it’s impossible to believe that police officers could be as stupid as Deb and her brother are in this book’s denouement.

I almost never put down a book I’ve started without finishing it – even bad books. That can be a serious problem when one is confronted with books like Dexter Is Delicious. I suppose I kept thinking it would get better, or that I’d learn more about Dexter’s adopted children and their tendency toward the darkness Dexter inhabits. Alas, it was not to be: I will never get those hours of my life back to spend reading better books. I suggest you avoid making the same mistake. show less

Best. Dexter. Title. Ever. Why? Because this book’s about cannibals. Fantastic.

I think this is perhaps the best book so far in the Dexter series. It was humorous and witty, and gave us a rare glimpse into the psyche of a serial killer who has inconveniently grown a soul. The book begins just after the birth of Dexter’s daughter, who sparks feelings of real love in his heart for the first time. In his zeal to protect his bundle of joy from monsters like himself, Dexter swears off killing forever. His Dark Passenger finds this sudden change of heart first amusing, then annoying, and in a fit of pique abandons Dexter just when he needs his help the most.

A cannibalistic coven has taken up residence in Miami, led by the son of a wealthy show more and powerful government official. Dexter must help his moody and foul-mouthed sister Deborah rescue the flesh-eaters before they devour the young woman they’ve kidnapped. Even without his Dark Passenger’s leathery assistance, Dexter is able to use his predatory instincts to locate the girl—only to find she’s not exactly what they thought.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The previous two were a little slow and a tad disappointing, so I wasn’t truly looking forward to reading this one. But I am a HUGE fan of the Showtime series, so I had to read it, and oh, what a delightful surprise! I adore witty writing, and book made me smile and chuckle and gasp in horror.
Mr. Lindsay did an excellent job of immersing me in Dexter’s struggle to cope with his newfound humanity. How does a soulless monster react when he suddenly cares about the people he’s only pretended to care about? How does he handle his stepchildren’s own dark and deadly desires, when he has resolved to put his own away forever? I especially love Dexter’s ‘conversations’ with his Dark Passenger; a character in and of itself who chuckles, snarls, or sulks as the need arises.

Delicious, indeed. show less

You sense Jeff Lindsay is quickly running out of steam just the same way his main character Dexter Morgan is.

Lindsay's "Dexter" series, which launched thrillingly under a curdled yellow moon five instalments ago, waxed quickly, reaching a crescendo with its Showtime TV serialisation which itself flourished madly and is now in its fourth or fifth series. Dexter's literary progress has been somewhat more stately, and for good reason: it's tough to know where to go with a set-up as singular as Dexter's. By instalment 3 Dexter was already presenting Lindsay with scenario dilemmas: an avenging vigilante psychopath operating under cover as a mild-mannered forensic scientist in bloodthirsty Miami (so much so Hong-Kong Phooey) - is such an show more improbable set up even for a one-off, let alone a series - that plot developments are inevitably constrained. After all, there are only so many times a supremely gifted and unscrupulous evil-doer can figure out Dexter's saucy secret before it becomes implausible that no-one else does.

And while, on one hand, there's not really anywhere a character like Dexter can go: he can't settle down and get married and have kids; he can't share his secret; he can't give up his nocturnal urges *and* stay interesting - on the other hand what gives these novels their dramatic impetus is precisely that Dexter sails so close to the wind that, to remain plausible as an ongoing proposition he has to do these things. Dexter's cover requires him to be close to people, and the relationships he chooses (with his adoptive sister, a girlfriend, a suspicious workmate) are by their nature volatile, that Dexter simply can't stay in suspended animation either: each novel contains a little more self-discovery, each novel somehow compels Dexter on to prosaic and dreary normalcy.

On so it is, by instalment 5 that, having exhausted other options including the freaky supernatural one (episode 3 - didn't work) Jeff Lindsay has no choice but to allow a now married Dexter (this sociopath once without a sexual, let alone romantic, tendency in his body) to become a father and start to feel the stirrings of human emotions. Which kind of defeats the point.

Each of these compromises makes the character less interesting, and oddly the same goes for the surrounding cast. Debs is muted, Chutsky barely represented (despite figuring largely in the plot), even Vince Matsuoka seems to have lost his perverted interest in what goes on. Nor does the primary antagonist, this time, have any special connection with Dexter much less special knowledge of Dexter's dastardly doings (perhaps to retain plausibility, but at the cost of piquancy), is thinly drawn and indeed isn't even introduced to the action until the final act.

And nor is there the spectre of a Sergeant Doakes or a Detective Coulter on Dexter's case and closing in for the home team, ratcheting up the tension and posing the squeamish questions for the reader (such as, "why am I pulling for a psychopathic murderer over a policeman who has correctly figured him out?").

In fairness there is a tension of this sort, introduced by the return of a character from a former instalment, but even that seems half-hearted, not enough is made of it, and it necessitates some awkward plotting, requiring Deborah to be conveniently absent or unconscious on a couple of occasions to avoid running into this chap. Now Lindsay's plotting has always been a bit thin, but daylight was showing through here and on one or two other occasions you could see significant developments (including the denouement) coming a mile off.

Lindsay's playful prose, juicy characterisation and gift for wry observations about the venality of modern life has always outstripped his plotting in any case, but even that feels careworn here: there are only so many times jokes about crazy driving on Miami freeways pay off, and the characterisation is generally flat (though there's a great running joke about Rita's incoherence). Deborah's sizzling invective of earlier novels is reduced to a habit of repeatedly punching Dexter on the arm.

In short, Dexter is Delicious feels a lot like Jeff Lindsay going through the motions. Dexter may have been delicious once, but it is all tasting a bit stale on the fifth go-round. Lindsay is a terrific writer and, for all my bearishness, this is still a much better read than most in its genre, but all the same Dexter feels depleted, dreary and dismal. It's time he were retired, so Jeff Lindsay can invent another delicious character to thrill and dazzle us. show less

And delicious he certainly is. I was first introduced to Dexter via the television series then quickly went out and purchased the books. In this installment someone has kidnapped two teenaged girls. When the burned body of one is found, it is evident she had been eaten. Vampires and cannibals in Miami? Dexter has seen stranger things, he thought, until he finds the remaining teen and discovers she doesn’t want to be rescued. It is her dream to be eaten by cannibals. There are a lot of changes in Dexter’s life. Besides being married, he is now a father to Lily Anne. And as though his life isn’t complicated enough, his brother Brian, serial killer numero uno, shows up on his doorstep and injects himself into Dexter’s happy family show more life. I vaguely remember Brian but I keep getting the TV series and books mixed up. I thought he had tried to kill Dexter’s step-sister Deb, or encourage Dexter to kill her. Whereas Dexter had the careful coaching of his police officer stepfather, Brian was left to his own accord, being shuffled from foster home to foster home and not having anyone to set boundaries for him. Why Dexter is such a wimp around Brian I don’t know. And I would think once Deb sees Brian she would remember he tried to kill her. But the two never meet. Deb has her hands full with the case and with her personal life. Not as much action as the previous books, but Dexter is still an entertaining sociopath. show less