Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

JEFF LINDSAY – DEXTER’S FINAL CUT

The author, Jeff LindSay, sold his character to television where Dexter became the main hero of a series that lasted seven seasons at the end of which he officially died, but did he really die or just disappear? No one will ever know, except the audience if a new season appears one day.

It depends a lot on what is going to happen to Dexter in the mean time as a book character. And the seventh book has just been released, or has at least finally reached my desk in my distant mountains. The title may mean he is going to be finished, our Dexter, and this volume is the last one. Or it may mean something more down to earth as we are going to see.

Jeff Lindsay had already parted with the time line and events or circumstances of the TV series in the last volumes of his book series, and that was good though confusing since we had two Dexters. Now the TV Dexter is dead Jeff Lindsay can recapture his character and go back to his own business. But this volume has to settle accounts with TV.

Jeff Lindsay cannot obviously blow up the TV network that exploited his character to death (he made quite a pile of green backs from the adventure), but he can bring a TV series in his book and settle accounts with television in his book. Television and the series in the book are hijacking Dexter from his standard life and his not so standard pastime and turn Dexter into a counselor to some TV star, Robert Chase, chase me if you can, and his sister into an assistant to the second TV star, Jackie Forrest, and don’t get lost in that forest with two r’s.

Jackie Forrest is stalked by some criminal mind who becomes a serial killer to force Jackie Forrest to see him with her own eyes and to accept to acknowledge his existence by becoming his object, his thing, though he does not know exactly what he wants from her, except absolute servitude and submission. Dexter then accepts to look after her, be her protective blanket, and sure enough he gets rid of the menace. But another appears from inside the shooting perimeter, nothing to do with guns and everything to do with cameras.

But things are vicious and I won’t say more about that side of the book, except that Jeff Lindsay eliminates the stars with a snuffer one after the other. But that is not enough as for vengeance. So he manages to depict the female star as being vain, superficial, self centered, obsessed with sex and of course she traps Dexter and he falls, and he adds so many other qualities nurtured in her by her stardom that she becomes a monster, and he piles up the incredibly non-ecological and uneconomical conditions that surround her. He manages to add some pedophilia in the star system, a man liking little girls, and everyone is blind to it because he is a star and has a high TVQ, he is popular and he attracts a big audience. At the same time the pedophile is a daily predator on all girls around and he has the bad taste and the silly idea to capture Dexter’s own stepdaughter. Poor darling man, you’re dead, that’s for sure, when Dexter catches you. I hope you can swim, or at least your body parts can.

Dexter appears here as having lost his main concentration and objective and he becomes the play toy of a female star who promises to give him a career, at least for the time of the shooting with an under-five part, and he is vain enough to dream he was going to have a career in Hollywood and why not an Oscar. Ready to abandon everything and everyone to follow the call of the stars, at least till the kidnapping of his stepdaughter calls him back to reality, the dusty and muddy reality of Miami.

If you want to know whether Dexter is dead or finished or terminated at the end of this volume, or whether there will be another volume soon, you will have to read the book. In spite of the false tracks on which Jeff Lindsay will set you, you can surmise or conjecture the truth rather fast, at least if you have some practice in thriller-reading. I find the book at times slightly too slow, maybe even verbose, when Dexter loses himself in his newly found human sentiments for the female star that tries to illuminate his vanity and capture his attention.

But, well, it is funny in a way. I just hope there will be another volume and it will be slightly more dynamic. The final cut is of course the final “cut” order he gets from the director or show-runner or whoever that man may be – and HE might be a woman seeing how much vodka HE drinks – at the end of the last take of the last scene of his under-five part, and the book opens with that last cut. But that last cut will cut Dexter to the bone for sure and that will be a good thing because he is really made dumb and besotted by the skin, flesh and various body part of a female star-object, a perambulating inflatable doll in a way, inflated by whatever TVQ the audience projects into the outside skin of that evanescent being.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU