another delicious dark dexter story from jeff lindsay

Dexter is Delicious is the fifth book in the Dexter series from Jeff Lindsay, and yes, these are the books the award-winning TV show Dexter is based on.

The serial killer as hero premise seems old hat now, but when the first book, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, was released, the concept was constantly being debated by everyone from high-brow critics to bible-bashing mid-westerners. How dare Lindsay make the hero a psychopathic serial killer? Shocking!
With an award-winning TV show and a heart-throb actor in the central role, the Dexter franchise has become practically mainstream.
Luckily the books are still as well-written as they always were; the structure of the internal monologue continues to work, and the reader still wonders just how Lindsay knows so much about how a serial killer thinks.
In the TV series, Dexter is a father, and in Dexter is Delicious his daughter Lily Anne is also the one thing that’s keeping him on the straight and narrow and out of the electric chair.
At least until he realises that someone from his past, someone who knows rather too much about what really makes Dexter tick, reappears in his life.
If Dexter is threatened, then Lily Anne is threatened; and that is not something you want an accomplished murderer like Dexter thinking about.
To complicate matters, Dexter’s job as a blood spatter analyst gets him involved in the disappearance of an 18-year-old girl who may have been abducted by vampires – who could also be cannibals.
Lindsay’s books are so much more detailed than the TV show, although the voice-over used in the show mirrors somewhat the internal monologue of the character in the novels.
Still, you can read the books and watch the show without too many discrepancies cropping up, which isn’t always true.
For lovers of crime thrillers and murder mysteries or lovers of novels about psychopaths, you can’t go past the Dexter novels; they are a unique twist on a great genre.

Dexter is Delicious by Jeff Lindsay is published by Orion Books and is available at all good book stores and online.

another piece of reality tv masquerading as a novel from lauren conrad

This is the third book in Lauren Conrad’s LA Candy series based, rather obviously, on her own experiences in the reality TV show, The Hills.

While it’s plastered with the bold “#1 New York Times Bestselling Author” blurb, you just know that Conrad has sold so many books simply because of her pseudo-celebrity.
The story is boring, conventional and teenaged; there’s the nasty girl who get’s her comeuppence, the apparently genuine boy who only wants to be on TV, the clueless but kind bimbo who is easily led astray and the “ordinary-girl-caught-up-in-things-beyond-her-control”, who is obviously Conrad herself.
While I’m sure Conrad, and her publishers, have never claimed that these books are literature, it offends my educated sensibilities that rubbish like Sugar and Spice – not even the title is original – manages to sell so many copies. 

It’s like the horrible success of the terribly written pap that is Twilight; there are so many better books out there that get left on the shelves because their authors haven’t been on TV / are Mormon moms with great publicists.
Sorry ... this rant has little to do with the actual book I’m supposed to be reviewing, but I just had to have a say.
Back to Sugar and Spice. The “plot” follows the continuing “adventures” of Jane (Conrad’s alter-ego), Scarlett, various boyfriends, Madison, Gaby, the PR company they work for (I know, I know, even the job is borrowed) and new addition Sophia.
Madison manages to get a job at Jane’s company ensuring the TV crew have lots of shots of simmering hatred between the two, and the machinations and bitch-fights ensue.
And that’s about it. Eventually Madison gets her comeuppence and Jane and BFF Scarlett escape the clutches of big bad LA TV-land.
While nothing new happens, Sugar and Spice is not totally horrible. It’s written slightly better than the Twilight series for example, and it clearly shows that being on a reality TV show isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Not that, that stopped most of the cast of The Hills moving to The City in New York and doing it all over again.
Oh well ... there’s got to be some sort of TV show for all those hopeful country kids who don’t get picked for America’s Next Top Model, So You Think You Can Dance, X-Factor or American Idol.
After all, on shows like The Hills and The City, you don’t have to have any sort of talent at all to become famous – just look at Jersey Shore.

Sugar and Spice by Lauren Conrad is published by HarperCollins and is available from good book stores and online. 

not flash enough for television?

Niki Bruce reviews the original source of a TV show and finds it very different.


CURRENTLY showing on Channel 5, the Flashforward TV series is based on the book by the same name, but with major plot differences, by Robert J Sawyer.

Although the basic premise – that something causes people around the world to pass out and dream about jumping forward in time – is the same in the book and the series, substantial details are not.

Most notably, the central characters in the book version are physicists based at CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, in Switzerland. In the TV version, the central characters are much more exciting – FBI agents based in Los Angeles.

All of this, to my mind, actually takes away from Sawyer's very interesting storyline and also, quite horribly, destroys the whole premise that is the 'flash forward' phenomenon.

Basically in the book, the flash forward occurs because of an experiment with the Hadron Collider, it is the cause of the action that is the basis of the story. In the TV show the reason behind why the flash forward occurs is something to do with an experiment at Stanford University.

This is where the show's producers have given a token nod to Sawyer's book – the character at Stanford is called Dr. Lloyd Simcoe, much reduced from his central role in the original version. Obviously the TV guys didn't think a series with a balding, 40-something physicist working in Switzerland would be a ratings winner.

And this is also why the TV is nonsensical. Don't get me wrong; I'm all for fantasy and science fiction with crazy plots and unbelievable storylines, but they should make some sort of basic sense.

In Sawyer's book, there are great swathes of physics, paragraphs on mathematics and philosophy and also musings about guilt and personal choice – all of which give the reader something more meaty to think on.

Would you really want to know the future if you knew you were going to be dead? Or working in a dead-end job, married to the wrong person or not married to the person you now love?

Or, on the other hand, would you want to know the future if it could tell you what you should be studying now? Or could tell you how your children are going to turn out; or could let you know that you'll be happily married to the person you love?

Sawyer's version of Flashforward is more philosophical, it's more complex and detailed, and naturally enough, that's not good TV.

Admittedly the producers of the show say that it is 'loosely based' on Sawyer's book, but from what I've seen the two entities are on opposite sides of the entertainment universe.

I suppose what is most annoying is that the name is the same. And the publishers of the book, Gollancz, are pitching it as being linked to the TV series, which is doing quite well around the world.

This is rather disingenuous, as the TV show is really nothing like the book and it looks more like the publisher is simply trying to travel on the coattails of the show, which is in some way demeaning for the novel which deserves better.

If you enjoy juicy technical science fiction rather than TV-land pap, go for Sawyer's version. You won't be disappointed and you'll learn things about physics that you would never have imagined.

Flashforward by Robert J Sawyer is published by Gollancz and is available from good book stores and online.

First published on The Straits Times blogs on November 17, 2009