Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 22

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 Dresden arrives at his office, and we get a look at his adorable little pamphlets. He says he wrote some of
them himself, which for me mostly raises the question: who else wrote some of the pamphlets? He takes a very long time to search what doesn't sound like a very large office, and eventually finds Murphy lying on the floor next to his desk, with a horrible scorpion sting on her arm. Harry, quite reasonably, calls 911, and Murphy takes advantage of his distraction to handcuff him to herself. She also accuses him of "setting [her] up", because apparently asking her to stop searching his desk, which she was already in the process of doing, when she had gone to his office without telling him ahead of time, was clearly a clever ploy to get her to look in the desk so she would be stung by the evil scorpion amulet. 

Honestly, I would have preferred almost any approach to making Harry feel appropriately isolated other than Murphy's increasingly unreasonable mistrust and hostility. It's not as though she actually fills the "normal person to whom Harry can explain things" role after the first couple chapters, and there's enough direct address explanation that we didn't rally need someone in that role in the first place. 

Then the scorpion, who has been hiding under the desk, attacks. Harry locks it in his office and runs for the elevators, since he can't really take the stairs with an injured and semiconscious Murphy handcuffed to him at the wrist. They get into the elevator, while the scorpion monster, which be this point he has determined is a construct, meant to slowly absorb power once activated, getting bigger and stronger as it does, starts trying to rip through the outer doors. Managing this kind of construct from all the way out in his evil Lake Providence lair is the kind of thing I'm talking about with Victor having a gift for magic-at-a-distance. We hear a lot about how wizards prefer to operate from as far away as possible, but Victor "Shadowman" sells, the one-off, first book villain, is the only practitioner we see put this into practice for anything other than tracking and summoning. 

There follows what is probably the most memorable scene in this book. The scorpion lands on top of the elevator, which causes it to stop on like, the second floor, so Harry uses a big gust of wind to slam the elevator into the top of the shaft, crushing the scorpion, then puts them in a bouncy shield to survive the crash at the bottom, a trick he will use again to rather more dramatic effect in White Night. This is actually pretty cool, but it's hard to do justice to it without just copying the whole thing here. 

The giant bug defeated, they survived, and Harry takes a moment to loudly celebrate before remembering that this doesn't actually get him any closer to defeating Victor Sells, and now he definitely can't use the scorpion. 

I know this post is both short and late. It' hard to find much to say about the action heavy chapters. Jim Butcher can write an action scene, but I kind of can't, so I don't really have the tool set to talk about what he's doing on a craft level, and they don't usually give me a lot to analyze in the way of plot, characterization, or worldbuilding, so unless there's a serious writing issue, like the pronoun avoidance in Deat Beat, or a bit of cleverness that also reveals character (see again, White Night), I'm sort of at a loss. This should be less of an issue as the series goes on and we start seeing first more magical gadgets, and then more internality, during the mid-book fight scenes. 

The next post should go up on Wednesday as usual. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things.