Liza C's Reviews > Darkly Dreaming Dexter

** spoiler alert ** I read this series of books because I was so taken by the Showtime series. And you know what? I liked the TV show better! The books are good, and it's fun to get "inside the mind" of Dexter, but because the plot of the book follows pretty closely to the first season of the TV show, it was hard not to make comparisons.

Spoilers below, so don't continue reading if you don't want to know what happens!

A few things that I thought the TV show did a lot better was the whole "flirting with another killer" plotline. In the books as in the TV show, Dexter is absolutely enthralled by this other killer's method of draining the bodies of blood, and recognizes that the killer is communicating with him. However, in the books the killer goes largely absent from the plot, where in the TV show he shows up as Dexter's foster sister's boyfriend. Which is just marvelous - it reveals him to be just THAT much more creepy, that he can have that COMPLETE of a mask. And it makes so much more sense on the TV show that he's Dexter's brother. We're gifted with a lot more of Dexter's flashbacks and his aversion to blood than in the books, if you can believe that. In the book it feels like, "Oh hey, you're my brother? Neat." where in the TV show it's much more shocking, much more of a draw for Dexter to follow along in his brother's footsteps, and join him in killing indescriminantly. And, therefore, much more important for the character when in the TV show he kills his brother. In the book, he lets his brother go (presumably to show up again in some later installment). Also in the book, he almost kills is foster sister... so now, she KNOWS that he's a "monster". On the TV show, NO ONE knows. It makes him that much more of a lonely hero, of sorts. And I just find it incredibly unrealistic that a cop sister who finds out her brother is a murderer would just accept that fact and move on.