Hello, Some of you may have noticed my mild (!) obsession with Jeff Lindsay's Dexter. Sophie from OrionBooks sent me an email a couple of weeks back, informing me of the fifth Dexter book that's being released this month: Dexter Is Delicious. Dexter - a dad? Slowly becoming more and more human? My curiosity's piqued.
With the book being released tomorrow, on Sophie's request, below's an extract of the first couple of pages. Hop over to Shots to win some Dexter memorabilia tomorrow (Thursday, 18th August), and join in the fun!
I really do wish I'd read the book before writing this post, for I would have liked to give some insight into the book itself, but you can be rest assured that in due course, that will happen. I've been stupidly busy with work, and reading Wolf Hall which is a chunkster of immense proportions!
That said, the only comment I have on this book is, I'm having a hard time imagining Dexter as a father, and considering the fourth book was slightly... soapy... what's this book going to be like? Return to the engrossing nail biting world of Dexter, or further down the soapiness... I am hoping for the former, for what that's worth... apologies for not reading the book first though!
Without much further ado...
This part of the hospital seems like foreign country to me. There is no sense of the battlefield here, no surgical teams in gore-stained scrubs trading witty remarks about missing body parts, no steely-eyed ad- ministrators with their clipboards, no herds of old drunks in wheelchairs, and above all, no flocks of wide-eyed sheep huddled together in fear at what might come out of the double steel doors. There is no stench of blood, antiseptic, and terror; the smells here are kinder, homier. Even the colors are different: softer, more pastel, without the drab, battleship utilitarianism of the walls in other parts of the building. There are, in fact, none of the sights and sounds and dreadful smells I have come to associate with hospitals, none at all. There is only the crowd of moon-eyed men standing at the big window, and to my infinite surprise, I am one of them.
We stand together, happily pressed up to the glass and cheerfully making space for any newcomer. White, black, brown; Latin, African-American, Asian- American, Creole – it doesn’t matter. We are all broth- ers. No one sneers or frowns; no one seems to care about getting an accidental nudge in the ribs now and again, and no one, wonder of all, seems to harbor any violent thoughts about any of the others. Not even me. Instead, we all cluster at the glass, looking at the miraculous commonplace in the next room.
Are these human beings? Can this really be the Miami I have always lived in? Or has some strange physics experiment in an underground supercollider sent us all to live in Bizarro World, where everyone is kind and tolerant and happy all the time?
Where is the joyfully homicidal crowd of yesteryear? Where are the well-armed, juiced-up, half-crazed, ready-to-kill friends of my youth? Has all this changed, vanished, washed away forever in the light from yon- der window?
What fantastic vision beyond the glass has taken a hallway filled with normal, wicked, face-breaking, neck-snapping humans and turned them into a clot of bland and drooling happy-wappys?
Unbelieving, I look again, and there it is. There it still is. Four neat rows of pink and brown, tiny wig- gling creatures, so small and prunish and useless – and yet it is they who have turned this crowd of healthy, kill-crazy humans into a half-melted splotch of dribbling helplessness. And beyond this mighty feat of magic, even more absurd and dramatic and unbelievable, one of those tiny pink lumps has taken our Dark Dabbler, Dexter the Decidedly Dreadful, and made him, too, into a thing of quiet and contemplative chin spittle. And there it lies, waving its toes at the strip lights, utterly unaware of the miracle it has performed – unaware, indeed, even of the very toes it wiggles, for it is the absolute Avatar of Unaware – and yet, look what it has done in all its unthink- ing, unknowing wigglehood. Look at it there, the small, wet, sour-smelling marvel that has changed everything.
Lily Anne.
Three small and very ordinary syllables. Sounds with no real meaning – and yet strung together and attached to the tiny lump of flesh that squirms there on its pedestal, it has performed the mightiest of mag- ical feats. It has turned Dexter Dead for Decades into something with a heart that beats and pumps true life, something that almost feels, that so very nearly resembles a human being.