Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 8

 

Photo by Laura Lee Moreau on Unsplash

Dresden, get your fucking cat fixed. 

Dresden gets home, and we get a description of his basement apartment and the boarding house it's in. We are finally introduced to Mister, Dresden's inexplicably enormous tomcat. Mister is a wonderful cat, and I don't get on people for doing the indoor/outdoor thing, but if you're gonna do that, you really need to get them neutered. (Doing this early on might also have spared Harry some embarrassment in Summer Knight). Did they not have low-cost spay/neuter programs in Chicago at this point in time? Actually, this raises an interesting question. There's a popular fan theory that Mister is half-Malk, which would technically make him a changeling. Since Malks talk, and Mister doesn't, he presumably either Chose mortal or didn't Choose at all. Given that he was at least 17 and still going strong the last time we saw him, I'm betting on the latter (this is also the strongest evidence we have that he is part fae). But in either case, Mister is running around out there siring little quarter-Malk kittens, and like, are they changelings? Do they have to Choose? Do Malk changelings even get the Choice, given that they're half cat rather than half human? 

Once he's said hello to the cat, Dresden goes down to the lab to do some potion making, which is referred to here and (as far as I can recall) nowhere else as "alchemy". We get some discussion of how he handles heat and light, since gas and electricity are out of the question. 

Then we get introduced to Bob. As they argue about whether Dresden will make a love potion as well as the escape potion he actually needs, I was struck by how mean they are to each other. This isn't the playful banter we get in later books, it feels hostile. If we found out any time before Dead Beat that Bob's personality reflects his owner, this would be really cool, subtle characterization of Dresden, and it's still very effective on a reread. It also puts an interesting light on Dresden's self-perception throughout the middle and later books that he's becoming a worse person. "These days, I'm not a very nice person." (Proven Guilty). Bob becomes more pleasant, more moral, and nicer to Dresden over time. In this book, Bob is hostile to Harry. He's also lazy, sneaky, transactional, and generally kinda sketch. Which implies that, at this point in the series, Dresden is a similarly sketchy dude – and he fucking hates himself. 

On the subject of character development, in White Night, when Dresden is having Lasciel-induced anger issues, he at one point has to stop what he's doing and count to ten, and reflects that he hasn't had to do that since he was a kid. In this scene, however, he has to count to 30 to not smash Bob's skull. The time gap should be something like 7 years, but he isn't a "kid" here, he's in his 20s. Did Dresden just...forget how angry he was in the early books? Is Lasciel fucking with his recall in White Night? Is he just really, really committed to the idea that he's only become a worse person as time has gone on?

I find the mechanics of potion making in this series kind of fascinating, and I don't think I'm alone in that. Consistent with the idea that magic comes from life, and especially from people, five of the eight ingredients for each potion represent, not the elements or the directions or some other schema of the natural world, but the five senses. The others are the base liquid, and ingredients representing the mind and spirit. Much of the ritual magic we see later in the series uses a similar component spread, albeit with no liquid and two sets of sensory items, one specific to the caster and one specific to the working, rather than a single set based on some unspecified interaction between caster and intent. There's also no magic circle here, but maybe the beaker or cauldron like, is the circle? I would love to know what the process is for getting sounds into jars. Honestly, I would read a whole short story just about Dresden gathering potion ingredients. 

Also, Dresden presents potion-making as a stress hobby, something he does to unwind and productively kill time when he can't sleep, but there's more to it than that. He can literally put his difficult emotions (worry, anger, stubbornness) into the potions, and then they're in there, providing energy for the magic, rather than in him where they do nothing useful and make it hard for him to sleep. This is how a lot of magic works in this would, and while Dresden presents himself as just a huge magic nerd with no social life, I think it's possible that the reason he has no other hobbies might be tied to the fact that he has no other coping skills. 

Information about low cost spay/neuter in Chicago can be found here. Most major cities have programs like this, and some states offer low-cost spay/neuter to Medicaid or SNAP recipients. 

Be gay, do crimes, and get your cats fixed.