{"id":8424,"date":"2022-03-12T13:55:42","date_gmt":"2022-03-12T19:55:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=8424"},"modified":"2022-03-12T13:55:42","modified_gmt":"2022-03-12T19:55:42","slug":"dexters-final-cut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/?p=8424","title":{"rendered":"Dexter&#8217;s Final Cut"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/81jCp45WiNL.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-8427\" src=\"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/81jCp45WiNL-201x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"201\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/81jCp45WiNL-201x300.jpg 201w, https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/81jCp45WiNL-686x1024.jpg 686w, https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/81jCp45WiNL-768x1146.jpg 768w, https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/81jCp45WiNL-1030x1536.jpg 1030w, https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/81jCp45WiNL-1373x2048.jpg 1373w, https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/81jCp45WiNL-624x931.jpg 624w, https:\/\/delirium.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/81jCp45WiNL.jpg 1527w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 201px) 100vw, 201px\" \/><\/a>A really long time ago, when I bought <a title=\"Dexter's Final Cut: A Novel by Jeff Lindsay, at Amazon\" href=\"https:\/\/smile.amazon.com\/Dexters-Final-Cut-Novel-Dexter\/dp\/0385536518\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dexter&#8217;s Final Cut<\/a> (at Half-Price books per uzh, back when I went book shopping just for fun, since I hadn&#8217;t yet bought all the Deathlands books and also there wasn&#8217;t a multi-year global pandemic yet[1]), I remember thinking that it was, you know, the last book. There&#8217;s a clear implication! Later, there was one more book which had an even more final title, and a new one hasn&#8217;t happened since then, so I accept.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, those two books, the only ones of the series I bought in hardback, have been staring at me for many years now, and I finally thought to myself, self, start finishing your serieses that are sitting on your to-read shelf. Like, take advantage of the lack of making it get bigger to make it get <em>smaller<\/em>! And that seemed like pretty good advice, so I grabbed it after all those years, and I read it, and haha it&#8217;s actually a pun on him being attached as advisor to a new cop show being filmed in Miami. Characters include the really annoying popular actor, the salty comedian who hide darkness behind his jokes[2], the impossibly, ethereally beautiful actress who is nevertheless just a smidge past her Hollywood prime, oh, and the serial killer who has been stalking her for months.<\/p>\n<p>The intersection of Dexter with these new characters went in a very different way than I expected, and in fact some latent humanity that has never before been present was awakened, and under other circumstances I think I&#8217;d very much want to talk about these things in a spoilery fashion, because they made a lot of sense despite being unexpected, and that kind of emergent character development is of great interest to me. (Plus I&#8217;d get to riff again on how he&#8217;s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, aspects of which make the series a lot more comedic than I&#8217;d have guessed it would be, back on <a title=\"My review of Darkly Dreaming Dexter\" href=\"https:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=514\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">day one<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>But instead I&#8217;m just sad, because while pulling up the link on Amazon, I saw an unfamiliar title, and goddammit, I skipped a book. So I&#8217;ve just read the next to last book in the series, which ended on a pretty badass cliffhanger to boot, and&#8230; I need to go read book six instead.<\/p>\n<p>Ugh. This has never happened to me before, I swear. (&#8230;except for the time I read Wishsong of Shannara not realizing it was the third book in a trilogy, but I was like 12 then.)<\/p>\n<p>To recap: ugh.<\/p>\n<p>[1] One of these is no longer true, and the other one is sort of semi-over, except for, you know, small children (of which I have like one and a half) who are not presently capable of immunization.<br \/>\n[2] You know, like every comedian. Also, he wasn&#8217;t very funny? Which I blame on the author, who is good at situational humor but not good at spoken humor. (Or maybe the comedian wasn&#8217;t supposed to <em>be<\/em> funny? But the remainder of the text doesn&#8217;t bear out that reading.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A really long time ago, when I bought Dexter&#8217;s Final Cut (at Half-Price books per uzh, back when I went book shopping just for fun, since I hadn&#8217;t yet bought all the Deathlands books and also there wasn&#8217;t a multi-year global pandemic yet[1]), I remember thinking that it was, you know, the last book. There&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[708],"class_list":["post-8424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-mystery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8424"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8437,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8424\/revisions\/8437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}