Underwhelming.

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Okay, I guess that was a little terse. It’s kind of meant to be a joke, given that The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova is 656 pages long. It’s also had one of the greatest publicity blitzes in recent memory—I’d been hearing about this book for weeks before it was published, with articles using such phrases as “one of the rare books that’s worthy of the hype.” I was so excited when it was available at the library. Darin needed something to read; I let him read it first.

He was underwhelmed. If you read EW, he completely agreed with its review, except he said, “I’d give it a B- instead of a B.”

The Historian is the story of several generations of scholars who have been obsessed by who Vlad the Impaler was and what really happened to him. The first problem I had with this book is this: in the first couple hundred pages, there are three narrators:

1. A woman in 2008, looking back to when she was 16, in 1972.
2. Her father, discussing events that happened in the early 1950s.
3. The father’s academic mentor, an Englishman, discussing what happened in the 1930s.

Guess what? They all sound exactly the same. Same stentorian phrases, same high-flown descriptions. I had to pay particular attention to the opening phrase of any given chapter so I could be sure as to who in the hell was speaking, or, in many cases, writing—there are lots and lots of letters that apparently everyone leaves around describing what had happened at some period in the past.

And I get the point, Kostova wants to describe a different, more removed world, but the only detail I remember her including that links what happens in her book to the real world is a passing reflection that after the events that happened here, the Soviets invaded Hungary. Oh, and a discussion of what would happen if someone like Stalin were immortal, the damage he could do. (Were the extent and severity of Stalin’s crimes as well known in the 1950s? I ask because I actually don’t know the answer to that.)

Another problem is the writing about past events. Everyone describes everything exactly chronologically. The problem with this is, in several cases, the writer knows how it’s going to turn out but somehow forgets to put that in the beginning of the letter they’ve left for posterity. Imagine if someone who lived in NYC wrote down the events of their day on September 11, not just as history but as a warning to future readers. Think they might put some of the salient points up front?

Not in this book. No, in this book people will just leave off in the middle of their stories, needing to pause for whatever reason.

Janet Maslin, in her review, mentions the endless travelogues. Yup, gotta agree with her there. Worse than that, however, is that these descriptions go on for so damn long I forget what the characters are doing there. There’s one section that’s an ancient letter describing the pilgrimage of some monks from Wallachia to Constantinople and from there to Bulgaria, and as I started reading it I suddenly realized I had no idea what the point was.

The Historian isn’t terrible; it’s just ponderous. And if there’s one thing a frickin’ vampire novel shouldn’t be, it’s ponderous. So I’m with Darin: I give it a B-. And I want the name of Kostova’s publicist for my own future reference.

Dexter Morgan, the hero and narrator of Jeff Lindsay’s novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter, is a guy with a problem: while he doesn’t exactly know what’s “right” and what’s “wrong,” he’s a serial killer who’s known from a young age both what he is and that murder is generally considered “wrong.” His foster father, a cop, trained him how to channel his impulses toward a fairly narrow set of victims: other serial killers.

In his day-to-day life, the one where he pretends to be human and interacts with humans with complete incomprehension of what they’re thinking, Dexter is a blood splatter analyst for the Miami police department. His foster sister, Deborah, is a cop who really wants out of vice and into homicide. There’s a serial killer preying on the hookers on the Tamiami Trail, and Deb knows this could be her ticket to a detective’s badge. She needs Dexter to give him one of his famed “hunches.” Dexter often has hunches when serial killers are on the loose, because he knows how to think like them better than anyone. But the Tamiami Trail killer is different—not only does Dexter highly admire the killer’s technique, if not his aims, but the killings seem almost like they’re meant to communicate something specifically to him. Dexter, you see, has been having strange, incomprehensible dreams, and he’s been sleep walking. The question he faces is: has he been sleep killing?

I started reading this at 10:30 last night and finished the entire thing shortly after 12, so I rate this one, Two thumbs, way up.

What I especially love in this book is how Lindsay keeps Dexter in character all the time, showing us Dexter’s point of view at all times. Dexter finds humans utterly incomprehensible. For example, there’s the female detective in charge of the Tamiami Trail case who seems to treat Dexter in the oddest way:

She finished with a few threats and sent the man away. “Indio,” she spat, as he lumbered out of earshot.

“It takes all kinds, Detective,” I said. “Even campesinos.” She looked up and ran her eyes over me, slowly, while I stood and wondered why. Had she forgotten what I looked like? But she finished with a big smile. She really did like me, the idiot.

“Hola, Dexter. What brings you here?”

“I heard you were here and couldn’t stay away. Please, Detective, when will you marry me?”

She giggled. The other officers within earshot exchanged a glance and then looked away. “I don’t buy a shoe until I try it on,” LaGuerta said. “No matter how good the shoe looks.” And while I was sure that was true, it didn’t actually explain to me why she stared at me with her tongue between her teeth as she said it. “Now go away, you distracting me. I have serious work here.”

Lindsay builds the suspense very nicely—Dexter knows he’s off, but how off is he?—and maintains a great balance between humor and horror. Dexter is a great narrator: ironic, charming, confident of his abilities, pathetic in his inhumanity. The ending has a few problems, but the thrill ride to get there, and the unexpected emotional punch of the unusual choice Dexter has to make, make it worthwhile.

The sequel, Dearly Devoted Dexter, is due out next month. I don’t know how long Lindsay will be able to keep up this balancing act, but I’m definitely picking up this book. And according to Lee Goldberg, Showtime has ordered a pilot for a series based on this book. To which I say, !!! I don’t know how they’d do it. Can you show the hero of a series killing people every week in a particularly inhuman manner?—well, I guess cop shows have been doing that for years. I’d at least tune in for one episode.