Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 18

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Dresden leaves the Varsity and goes on a long walk, because apparently that's what he does when he's sad
and feels like the problem facing him is unsolvable. I think we only actually see him do this one other time, in Skin Game, but that may simply be because he doesn't often simultaneously have occasion to despair and the freedom of movement necessary to go for a lengthy stroll. He makes an offhand reference to how walking around "in Chicago" at night, without really looking where he's going, is probably a bad idea, so I guess now is when we need to talk about the thing. In real life, Chicago is not in the top 10 most violent major cities in the US. It is 10th of the ten most murdery. (St. Louis, Missouri, holds first place in both categories, but you notice Laurell K. Hamilton was able to set an entire series there without constantly going on about the crime rate). Keep in mind that that's only major cities, and those are not always the most dangerous places. We're not gonna get into the fact that random violence by strangers isn't all that common in any context. It's not a place where a 6'8" white dude walking by himself needs to feel all that anxious. Obviously he'd be safe if he were a woman, but he's hardly taking his life into his hands here. There are basically two possible explanations for the disconnect. One is that Dresden drastically overestimates how dangerous Chicago is. That's totally possible. White people living in or near cities often have these kinds of fears. (Like, I might actually scream if I hear another person describe the boring middle-class suburb of Baltimore in which I currently live as "not the best neighborhood"). Typically though, this is tied to a certain amount of racism, and the Chicago Dresden experiences doesn't seem to contain very many people of color. The other, widely fan-theorized, option is that The Dresden Files is set in a slightly different Chicago from ours, one where there's a lot more crime and a lot fewer black people, and where Wrigley Field has a large parking lot. Never really having been to Chicago (once, but I was little-little), I'm not well situated to spot all the differences that can't be found on Wikipedia, but for the sake of not constantly wanting to yell at both Harry Dresden and Jim Butcher, this is the interpretation we're going with. Differences between real!Chicago and Dresdenverse!Chicago will be noted as I notice them. 

While Harry's walking, we get initial backstory on his parents, how how his mother died in childbirth, and his father died of an aneurism when he was 6, leaving him at the mercy of the foster care system. We find out that his father was a stage magician, and was responsible for his utterly unreasonable name. (Seriously, how even his Social Security Card? I have two middle names, which between the both of them only have as many many letters as "Copperfield", and the whole thing still doesn't fit on mine). He mentions that his father talked about his mother enough that he felt like he knew her, but what his father actually told him is... conspicuous in its absence. The fact that people whose older or only child is 6 are usually too young to randomly die of an aneurism is sufficient to provoke a certain amount of "heeeeey..." if you're paying attention, but for the most part there's very little here that hints as the true, flowchart-necessitating clusterfuckedness that is Harry's familial situation. 

His Long Walk of Sad eventually takes him to Linda Randall's house. Which, okay, but then he goes into her house, which is still very much an active crime scene, lies down on her bed, and takes. a. nap. This turns out to be a pretty solid call, and I guess everyone deals with grief differently, but...dude. 

When Dresden wakes up, he has an argument with himself about whether he's going to get up and try to deal with this, or just lie there and wait to die. I think this might actually be the first occurrence of the "dark" Inner Harry that we meet in later books. The side of the conversation that argues for continued survival certainly sounds like Inner Dresden, and like, who else would he be talking to?

Eventually, he wins the argument and gets up, feeling like maybe he can find a way out of this after all. This feeling is pretty much immediately validated when he spots a film canister, identical to the one he found in the yard at at the Sells's lake house. Dresden has about 5 seconds to be excited about this, and no time to think through the implications, before he notices that there's someone at the door. 

(Correction: In the post about Chapter 6, I discussed Harry not noticing that the film canister he found wasn't empty. I forgot that that one was empty, and this is the one with the important photos. Sorry about that.) 

That's what we've got for this chapter. We'll be doing Chapter 19 on Saturday, unless something even more apocalyptic happens between now and then, in which case we will do our best. Until then - Be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!