Review: The Bride Collector by Ted Dekker

This review is written from the perspective of a reader, not an editor or professional reviewer. I do dabble in writing now and then, but only for fun. Furthermore, I am a fan of all books by Ted Dekker. He became my favorite author while I was reading Black, my first and favorite Dekker book and one of The Circle series. So I am making no attempt to be objective. I am a proud Dekkie. Hey, I even dreamed about going to the Gathering last night, probably because I got my ticket in the mail yesterday.

I loved this book. My goal here is to try to tell you why.

It is a thriller, although it fits the horror category, too, with a little touch of a mysterious something that moves it into the spooky realm. Like all the Dekker thrillers, it is loaded with suspense. There are no spots where your environment intrudes to make you stir and think of getting a cup of coffee, no boring places where you can skip over stuff. If it was a movie and you had the iPhone app RunPee, it would tell you there were no places good for deserting the theater long enough to run and pee. Even when the story moves away from the villain to other fascinating characters and scenes, you still feel in the back of your mind the dread of what he is up to while you are not watching him.

The story is about a serial killer who dresses his victims as brides and drains their blood to "purify" them, and an FBI agent who is trying to catch him.

Dekker's characterization is very good in this book. My previous favorite author was Stephen King, and I have thought for many years that his best talent as a writer is making his characters true to reality, even when they are female. I wondered how he could know so clearly how a woman thought and felt without being one himself. The Bride Collector shows that same talent, not only for female characters but also for characters who have been emotionally traumatized and become mentally ill because of it. Having experienced some of this myself, I can see the real-life thinking Dekker has put into these characters.

Another excellent feature of this book is the way mental illness is portrayed. We are able to see each character as merely a human being trying to do the best he can to deal with life as it has happened to him. He learns how to protect himself during trauma and then he learns how to relax those protections when they no longer serve his best interests, which takes a great deal of courage. There is no feeling of judgment toward these characters, although society's view of them is mentioned as a fact of life. Rather, their eccentricities and differences are seen as gifts.

Most of Ted Dekker's books have a good versus evil theme in them, and this one does, too. The FBI against the serial killer is one facet, and the struggle in each character is another facet. The internal battle is most obvious in the mentally ill characters, because it is their job to get well. It was a surprise to me, though, to find the serial killer proclaiming the idea that God sees each of us as His favorite and as the most beautiful. I took this as an expression of the infinitude of God's love toward us: He doesn't just love us, He loves us infinitely. This idea in the serial killer's mind showed he wasn't 100% evil, and he too was fighting an internal battle.

Of course, I loved the brief allusion to The Circle stories. It made it even better that it was included as one of the "hearing voices and seeing things that aren't there" experiences of Paradise, one of the main characters. I mean, if you were to see a Roush, a large, talking, white bat, wouldn't you think you were seeing things that weren't there?

Add to all that a love story and a Colorado setting (Paradise can't be anywhere else), and you have a very enjoyable book.

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Arisia is a former avid reader and collector of too many books, which are now in boxes in her other house, waiting for her new bookcases to be unpacked and put together, except for her Dekker collection, which is in the one bookcase already assembled, along with the C.S. Lewis and Tolkien books and the Elsie Dinsmore collection. Former because she had to get a full time job as a computer programmer, and that doesn't leave near enough time for reading.