Storm Front Retrospective

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The writing in Storm Front is better, and the storytelling worse, than this book, and Jim Butcher's writing in general, usually gets credit for. After the second chapter, the descriptions are clear, evocative, and to the point. (And even the first two chapters have their moments, they just also have whatever that description of Murphy's makeup was). The way the Sight is handled when Harry is at the lake house deserves another mention here. Conveying a confusing experience which is inherently unfamiliar to the reader (since very few of us in the real world have this kind of magical vision) without actually being confusing is legitimately hard, and many writers better trained in prose craft than Jim Butcher fail to even realize the necessity of making the attempt. The dissemination of worldbuilding through dialog is consistently well-handled, although I'm glad the weird direct address conceit for infodumping in narration was dropped in later books. The banter was not up to the standard of the series as a whole, but it's not awful, except in the fight with Victor. 

So about the storytelling. No one's motivations make any sense. Okay, that's not fair. Linda's motivations make sense, including her hesitancy to share information with Dresden, and eventually deciding to do so. And the Beckets, who never actually talk, do things that make sense. 

Harry is contemptuous of Monica Sells for no damn reason, and it absolutely influences his early work on her case. He's squirrely and dishonest with Murphy even at the beginning when sh hasn't actually done anything to deserve it yet. The idea that knowing about the magical world could put her in danger from the council is obvious bullshit - if it were a real thing, he wouldn't be in the phone book under Wizards. It also wouldn't have been that hard to say "I can't get into the specifics, but even attempting this research would draw hostile attention to me, and maybe you as well." He does this thing, over and over, where he dangles in front of her face that he's keeping secrets, for some of which he actually does have a good reason, but then he won't tell her why, which kinda gives the impression that he's either a glaring asshole or an actual criminal. 

Murphy, meanwhile, takes out all her frustration with a difficult case on a hired consultant, and is way the hell too ready to suspect someone whom we're told at the outset is supposed to be her friend. She also apparently forgets that consultancy notwithstanding, PI license notwithstanding, Harry is a private citizen and she has no basis on which to forbid him from talking to Bianca, Linda, or anyone else he damn well pleases. And all she does by trying to tell him not to, and yelling at him when he does it anyway, is create disincentive to share the results of those conversations with her - and then when she gets angry and suspicious when he doesn't tell her what she found out. It's hard to know if she's this awful to anyone else, since we mostly don't see her talking to anyone other than Harry and Carmichael. I gotta say, this puts the amount if scrutiny she faces in later books into a rather different light. She put out warrants for Harry's arrest twice in the first two books, but then keeps hiring him. She's erratic, paranoid, and frankly abusive to her subordinates, and that's before the mental health issues she develops in between Grave Peril and Summer Knight. 

Marcone could have started by trying to hire Dresden to look into the Shadowman, rather than trying to hire him to not do that. Even by most of the way through the book, he had no idea where, or even who, Victor was, nor any reasonable expectation of being able to take him on if he did, but he did know there was magic involved, so it wouldn't have been totally unreasonable to, y'know, approach Chicago's only wizard for hire to help him sort it out. It feels like Marcone's "This is a private matter, let me bribe you to stay out of it" thing is mostly there to make him seem like a viable suspect and keep Harry from talking to him. It's out of character. 

Actually, that's sort of the issue with Murphy too. Not that it's out of character, it's not, but that she acts against her own best interests in order to be an additional obstacle for Harry and make sure he doesn't have any support. On a casual read, it just feels like everyone's being awful to each other for no reason, but on this kind of slow, thorough examination, it feels like some serious authorial hand-tipping, using every character around with protagonist as plot devices with very little concern for their internality. Seanan McGuire, among others I'm sure, has talked about how early in a novelist's career, you can't let the main characters be too smart if you want them to actually walk into dangerous situations, but eventually you get better at moving them around. And that's why I'm not too upset about Dresden not thinking to hide in a circle until the storm is over. It would have been the safe thing to do, but it would also have been hours of dead time, and lowered the stake of the final confrontation. I have ideas about how that could have been worked around, but I'm not here to write "How I would have fixed Storm Front", unless... would you want that? 'Cause I could do that. Let me know in the comments.

Anyway, a certain amount of poor judgement on the protagonist's part is forgivable, especially in a first novel. Making literally everyone around the protagonist wildly incompetent, inexplicably malevolent, or totally detached from reality because there's no reasonable way to move the story forward if anyone involved is making decisions the way a person might? That doesn't sit so well. And that's why I'm presenting this as a storytelling issue. Wonky characterization can be more a problem with the writing, but that's now how I would classify it when the characterization problems are in service of keeping the tension up during an otherwise non-functioning second act. Murphy is the big issue here, obviously. Her behavior in Linda's apartment is unprofessional bordering on nonsensical, and as much as I love the scorpion fight with the elevator, the circumstances under which is occurs are questionable at best. 

We also need to talk about the problematic shit, and for this I think we're gonna break out the bullet points:

• "I enjoy treating a woman like a lady.
• Whatever that nonsense about Murphy's makeup was. 
• Susan's blithe disregard for Harry's consent.
• Harry's blithe disregard for Linda's consent. 
• Nicknaming one of Marcone's employees "gimpy". 
• The violent magical murder of their series's only canonical female/female couple. Also every male character who has canonically even had sex with another male character - in the entire series - is introduced in this book and either dies during it or dies off-screen between books without ever reappearing. 
• The obligatory homophobia around Morgan performing CPR, which in addition to being, y'know, homophobic, is the kind of thing that encourages people to not do CPR because they have it in the same mental category as kissing. 
• I'm almost sure I'm missing at last one egregious instance of sexism. 
• Talking about sex work as though it's an addiction or a compulsion rather than a job. 

I don't think I have a lot more to say about any of these points that I did in the chapter pots, aside from good God those are some buried gays, it just seems appropriate to have a fully accounting - if nothing else we can use it for comparison to later books, see if it's actually getting better. 

Despite the fact that I apparently think the entire middle didn't work, I do still actually like this book. It's supported through it's myriad inadequacies by strong, compelling worldbuilding, and the fact that Jim Butcher can really write an action scene. I was also genuinely pleased and surprised by how Monica was handled - this isn't the kind of thing I'd expect him to get right, and he pretty much did. 

So this was the first book, both better and worse than I remember from my dozen or so previous reads. We're gonna pick up with the first chapter of Fool Moon on Saturday. In the interim, I'm gonna try and get the menus updated so you can go back through the reread series whenever you want. Until Saturday, be gay, do crimes, and read All. The. Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 27

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Dresden wakes up outside, in the rain, with Morgan leaning over him. There's a bit of obligatory
homophobia about getting CPR from Morgan, because the book's almost over, and we gotta get in just one more cringey problematic thing before the end. 

Harry doesn't entirely understand why Morgan saved him, since Morgan hates him and, last he checked, thinks he's the killer. Morgan doesn't entirely understand Dresden's confusion - he saw the end of the fight, and saving Harry was The Right Thing To Do. He's also, as Harry rather gleefully points out, going to have to report Harry's valorous actions to the Council, because that is also the Right Thing To Do. They might even lift the Doom of Damocles. From here, the chapter goes into a montage structure that I don't think we see in later books. We get quick snapshots on the fates of the Beckets, Monica and her kids, Susan, Murphy, and the outcome of the White Council meeting. 

There's a little vignette in there about Harry and Murphy's overlapping time in the hospital, during which he sent her flowers and the remaining half of the handcuffs, along with a note telling her not to ask how they got severed. He thinks she wouldn't "buy" that the chain was cut with a magic sword. I'm guessing this is a holdover from a previous draft in which the secrecy factor was higher, because there's absolutely no textual basis for assuming that she wouldn't believe "it got cut with a magic sword". I'm sure she'd have follow-up questions, and since Harry currently thinks telling her about the Council would endanger her life, I can see why he might have some trouble answering them, but "this raises like five more questions" isn't the same thing as "I don't believe you", and just - volunteering that there are additional things he won't tell her doesn't strike me as the best way to start repairing the damaged trust between them. Which is kind of backed up by the fact that while she resumes their professional relationship almost immediately, she no longer behaves as though they're friends. 

The chapter, and the book, ends with Harry brooding about how he might have started to convince the Council that he's not gonna turn evil, but for himself he's not so sure, because power and temptation and all that, but for now he's just gonna do his job. 

This has been a heck of a ride. I honestly never thought I'd b able to maintain this kind of writing on something resembling a schedule. I kind of want to try to figure out why this, when I can't do it with anything else where I've tried. I kind a weird kind of high off of this specific text-responsive, relatively high-speed light expository writing, and I just feel so productive. I'm gonna take a week to do a retrospective thing and then we're gonna dive straight into Fool Moon. I am also working on a longer post that's not this. I hope you've all had as much fun with this as I have. Until next week - be gay, do crimes, and read ALL THE THINGS! 

Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 26

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CN: Offhand reference to drug addiction and overdose. 

This chapter opens with Harry, cornered and bleeding where Mr. Beckett shot him in the hip, using the broom to Sorcerer's Apprentice the scorpions down into the living room, substantially leveling the odds of this fight, especially since the Beckets still haven't gotten their guns working. 

Victor starts throwing fire again, and informs Dresden that fighting back won't make a difference because all he, Victor, has to do is keep Dresden there until the house burns down. Dresden points out that this approach will, at minimum, kill them both of them and destroy all the 3-Eye in the house, which is enough to get Victor back to seriously trying to kill him. No time at all is spent on how odd it was for Victor to say that in the first place. He's neither an idealist now, as far as we know, sworn to any greater force with a claim on his loyalty sufficient to get him to die for the cause. He's in this for the money, and the power, and he can't make use of either one if he's dead. Even if we give some weight to the idea that he's in this because he wants a better life for his wife and kids, he has no reasonable way to ensure that they keep getting their cut after he dies, and even if he could, I don't think this little operation can actually continue without him - if it could, the Beckets would have gotten rid of him by now. So this sudden willingness to die if it means taking Harry down with him doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Especially because like two seconds earlier he was all "Surrender, I'll let you walk about" (I mean, presumably he was lying, but still), and what gets him off the "Then we'll both die!" train is Harry pointing out that if they let the house burn, the 3-Eye will burn with them. The progression of this scene very much implies that Victor values the drug over his own life, and not in an "I don't care if I OD, I need this fix" kind of way, and for the life of me I cannot think of any reason why this should be the case. Longtime readers will know that I deeply dislike attributing anything to sloppy writing, but if we discount that possibility, it leaves open the question of who or what Victor was working with, that he's apparently willing to die to protect a few shipments of a magical narcotic. This impression is reinforced when he orders the Beckets out, with instructions on how to get to their car without passing through the scorpion-infested living room. I'm almost sure Victor doesn't give a shit about their well-being, although he's had sex with both of them, so you never know, but it seems more likely that this is about the survival of the business, making sure that someone remains who can keep making and distributing the 3-Eye. Why? 

Awkwardly, this is never followed up on, and I don't think it ever will be. Harry could ask Helen what was going on there, but he's probably not going to. He's got this whole evening neatly filed away, a two bit sorcerer with more power and ambition than was reasonable, first noted instance of Nemesis's meddling. Unless something happens to bring it up again, like one of the Sells kids resurfacing, we're never likely to find out the whole of what was happening. 

Once the Beckets are safely out of harm's way, Victor summons the toad demon again. Unfortunately, he's not anything like as clever as he thinks he is, and in doing so, he gives Dresden its Name, allowing the real wizard to break his hold over it. Harry could have seized control himself, but that's illegal and he's validly counting on it to be more interested in getting vengeance on the man who's been commanding it against its will than in going after a random victim who got away from it a couple days ago. When Harry basically explains this to an increasingly panicked Victor, the sorcerer responds by trying to throw Harry at it. There's also a bit in there where he does this whole monologue about how the strong survive and the weak get eaten, which feels as weird and off as the rest of his behavior in this chapter. 

The tussle takes them over the railing, where they both dangle above the smoke-filled death pit the living room has become. Harry uses Murphy's handcuffs to secure himself, and is then able to pull Victor and the demon off the railing and down into the scorpions. Then he just kind of hangs there, watching Victor get devoured and waiting for his own death by smoke, heat, poison, or pointy claws. Compared to later books, Dresden puts remarkably little effort into not dying. He just hangs there, thinking about how he's hungry, and how he's hallucinating Warden Morgan coming at him with a sword...

Wouldn't be my blog if the second to last post weren't late, I guess. We're gonna do the final chapter on Wednesday, and a retrospective on the whole book the Wednesday after. I'm not sure yet whether I'll need another week after before we pick up with Fool Moon. Until like, tomorrow, Be Gay, Do Crimes, and Read All The Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 25

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Dresden takes another minute to really experience how magically gross the house is. There are dark spirits everywhere, feeding on the evil magic, the lust and greed within. He just kind of keeps his sight open for a good portion of this chapter, and these things are everywhere in the house, practically carpeting the walls and floor, and oozing out of Harry's way. 

The front door is unlocked, so Dresden is able to skulk right in, down the long dark hallway. I gotta say, I genuinely love the layout of this house, both as a vacation spot and as a setting for a big climactic showdown. The living room is actually below the ground floor entrance, and the kitchen and dining room are on a mezzanine above, with an exterior door opening on the elevated back deck. The whole thing is connected by a spiral staircase. The ritual is going on on that top level, with the stereo down in the living room, close enough to be heard but too far away to immediately get hexed up by the ambient magic. It must be expensive as hell to heat, but it sounds like a very attractive space, and it's got a lot going on tactically. Jim Butcher's experience with tabletop role-playing games shows to advantage here - I would absolutely play this combat. 

What is on the ground floor, is the supplies to make the 3-eye potion at like, a semi-industrial scale. Obligatory absinthe inaccuracy - with his sight active, Dresden can apparently see "madness" swimming in its depths. As a potion ingredient, this is a perfectly reasonable thing for absinthe to do, given the cultural narrative around it, but that isn't really the context in which it's presented. There are also apparently "peyote mushrooms". Peyote. Mushrooms. I can't. For anyone who didn't know, let me take a moment to spare you some future embarrassment. Peyote is a cactus. It is a cactus which contains mescaline. Aside from the fact that both are naturally occurring hallucinogens, it has very little in common with psilocybin mushrooms, which, as the name suggests, are mushrooms, and contain psilocybin rather than mescaline. They're completely unrelated, and this is an inexcusable failure of research. Other ingredients in the potion include alum and glitter. 

There's nothing Dresden can really do with those potion ingredients though, and time is short, so he sets the CD player on fire, and then uses a column of wind to levitate himself up to the kitchen mezzanine. I'm torn between recognizing that he'd have made an absolutely epic target of himself taking the stares, and being aware that this is a huge expenditure of energy, heading into a fight where he's gonna need every available resource. 

Victor is in a small circle, holding a rabbit and a sharpened spoon, while the Beckets have sex in a second circle, providing additional power for the spell. I'd love to know how the energy is getting between the two circles. I don't think we see anything quite like this setup in the later books - nested circles, yes, but not linked ones like this. I'm really hoping to find out at some point who, exactly, trained Victor Sells in sorcery, because he has a lot of tricks that we don't see even full wizards use. The language he casts in is, according to Harry, either Sumerian or Ancient Egyptian, which implies a possible connection back to either the ghouls or whoever DuMorne learned from, but I really want specifics here. Even Thorned Namshiel, one of the most experienced wizards in the entire setting, and possibly the most skilled magic user who has to deal with a mortal body, hasn't displayed this level of technical sophistication in thaumaturgy. 

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Harry throws Chekhov's Empty Film Canister at Victor, breaking the circle, interrupting the ritual, and releasing a whole bunch of built up magical energy. Victor, understandably, tries to set him on fire, which Harry deflects, igniting the ceiling beams. It's worth noting here that this fight is part of what established Harry's reputation for burning down buildings, and it was not actually his spell that set the house on fire. 

Victor calls an object to his hand, and Dresden doesn't pause to figure out what it is before switching the fight to physical violence. Victor is as caught off guard by this as magic users somehow always are, and that might have been the end of that, except that the Beckets have by this time had the chance to stop having sex and get their guns out. Mr. Becket only manages to fire once before his weapon jams, but that's enough to disrupt the fight, and give Victor the opportunity to get the scorpions out of what was apparently his scorpion holder. I don't know why he needs a special bone tube to hold his scorpions, or where he get such a thing, and I would love answers to both of those questions. Harry manages to get out of the way, but now he's cornered, facing Victor, two armed Beckets, and three rapidly growing scorpion constructs. But at least he has a broom?

We are very close to the end of the first book now - only two chapters left. I might take a week or something between the end of Storm Front and the beginning of Fool Moon, maybe write up a retrospective thing of the whole book, looking at patterns both within this first installment and as part of the series. The writeups for Chapters 26 and 27 will be coming out as usual on this coming Saturday and Wednesday. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things. 

Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 24

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Harry drives just, unreasonably fast, and manages to beat the storm to the Sells's lake house, although he's
driving through it most of the way there, so time is still extremely of the essence. The improbability of Harry not getting pulled over in this situation is sufficient that it's commented upon. It kind of leads one to wonder whether there's some sort of interference going on. At this point in the books, the only person who definitely has the ability and incentive to do something like that is the Leanansidhe, but I think it's worth considering the possibility that either Mac did something to intervene, or there's some kind of angelic power attached to the car itself. (I know it hasn't been confirmed confirmed that Mac is someways angelic, but I mean, c'mon). 

Dresden uses his Sight to check out the house, to look for magical traps and the like. It's spooky as hell, with gross vibes and sad ghosts and skulls just everywhere. his is the first tim we see Harry use his sight for something other than a soul gaze. Jim Butcher does a good job of dodging the imitative fallacy here. The description of seeing the trees in different seasons all at the same time, the windows as stretches of beach, conveys a confusing scene without actually being confusing. He also sees the house engulfed in ghostly flames, and a bigger skull hanging over the house, portents of possible fire and almost certain death in the house's near future. I don't remember the Sight being prescient like this in later books, so that's something to keep an eye on. 

He's briefly but intensely tempted by the dark power that has congealed around the place. He wants to father it up and use it to destroy the house, with Victor inside it, and then set up shop as an evil wizard in his own right, able to defy even with wrath of the White Council. The pre-existing ambient badness plays on his acute anger and chronic resentment, reminding him that not only is he in a precarious spot right now, with someone trying to kill him, all the choices he made in the past, to turn aside from dark magic and the strength it offers, to follow the laws of magic, hasn't done a damn thing to stop the council, Murphy, and the world in general from treating him with the mix of contempt and suspicion that makes a guy wonder why he's even bothering. But then his pentacle burns cold against his chest, and he feels a phantom, feminine hand holding his. This appears to be interference from the psychic impression of his mother, presumably from the magic bloodline voicemail she left for him and Thomas. We don't get any random emanations from her between Blood Rites and Changes. As this reread progresses, I'm gonna need to keep an eye on how his emotional processes shift in the period between the "voicemail" fading and Harry receiving Margaret's knowledge of the Ways, especially during Small Favor and Turn Coat, when Harry is as close to alone in his own head as the gets. Just Harry, Dark Harry, and the baby... man, for someone who talks a lot about how alone he is, it is a fucking party up in there. 

Once his briefly renewed flirtation with the dark side has been interrupted, Harry takes a minute to go over how the pentacle is a symbol of good magic, the truest test of a person is how they use their strength, wizards don't use magic to kill people, with great power comes great responsibility, et cetera. He's finally not angry, but now he feels, quite reasonably, scared and alone and wildly underprepared for what he's about to undertake. 

That's what we got for this week - I find I have less to say about the process of getting the post together when I was actually prepared. Chapter 25 should be going up on Wednesday as usual. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things. 

Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 23

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 Harry takes advantage of the slippery ectoplasm and everyone being distracted by the medical emergency to wriggle Murphy's hand out of the handcuffs. This laves him with them still attached, but h has those big boney tall dude wrists, so that cuff isn't coming off him without either a key or a saw. 

He's discouraged and pissed off, and it's started raining again, but he hasn't given up, and after doing some weather math, and trying to tell the EMTs how to do their jobs, he's ready to do this thing. Unfortunately, the bad guys are all the way out in the suburbs, his car is still in the shop, and the...Studebaker? he borrowed from Mike the Mechanic is still at SI headquarters, which is not exactly a safe place to visit right now. So he heads over to Mac's pub, where virtually the entire magical community of Chicago is taking shelter. 

Apparently everyone already knows that Harry has gotten into a conflict with a dark practitioner. I feel like this raises some questions about how much they already knew about what was going on, and if the answer is any, why no one talked to him about it. In White Night, Harry says the less powerful members of the magical community come to him about things. Either that didn't start until after this book, which would make some sense, or it was never really that much of a thing. Apparently the stuff at the pub that helps break up Cranky Wizard Energy is also better than nothing for staying safe from the fallout of this kind of magical conflict. I can't imagine that it's better than a threshold - in fact, Dresden pretty much says it's not in Dead Beat, so their presence here seems to suggest a socioeconomic aspect to the term "have-nots of the magical community". A lot of these people rent, which isn't that unusual in a major city, or by itself an indicator or financial problems, but still. A lot of them live alone. A lot of them move too frequently to establish a decent threshold, for any given place to really feel like home. That's significant, but it doesn't get a lot of tim or attention here, and I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. Dresden can't rely on the limited protection of Mac's creative interior decorating, since he's the actual target of the spell. He brings up, and then discards, the possibility of hiding in the Nevernever, which is a valid thing to both consider and not do under the circumstances, but he never considers putting himself in a circle. I do not understand this. He said in Turn Coat that this would work. Why? Obviously it wouldn't stop the problem in a long-term way, but he could ride this storm out and have the big showdown when he's not racing the clock to avoid having his heart ripped out. 

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He gets the keys from Mac, whose reaction time with the keys suggests he may have seen this coming,
and then Morgan walks in. He's worked out that the killer is using the storms, or more likely Luccio figured it out on the way over from Edinburgh, and called Morgan as soon as she arrived in Chicago, but he still thinks Dresden is the bad guy, so he's gonna try and keep him here until the storm passes. This is a pretty solid plan, although it doesn't really take into account Dresden's willingness to use physical violence, despite having received a demonstration in like Chapter 7. Harry has basically three choices here although he only considers one of them. He could say "Sure, sure, and you should probably put me in a circle first, just to be safe!", enjoy a steak sandwich, and head back out after the storm. Morgan could make no reasonable objection to this, and it would be So. Much. Safer. Than going out now. While it would be less likely to work h could also have tried "Look, you can watch me just as good on the road to Lake Providence, and it's not like I can do a big act of thaumaturgy while I'm driving. Come with me. If I'm the bad guy, you lose nothing, and if I'm telling the truth, I'm taking the hand of the Councils justice directly to the real killer." It might not have worked, but he wouldn't have lost much on the attempt. 

Instead, he does the Dresden thing, acts for half a second like he's gonna go along, and then hits Morgan over the head with a wooden chair and lives his unconscious body lying on the floor. I like that immediately before this, there was a whole thing about how, when real wizards get into it, the psychics and hedge witches and whatever all else stay as far out of the way as they possibly can. At the moment, that's not very far, since they're literally in the same room as Harry and Morgan, but it tidily explains the total noninvolvement by this large crowd of people in what is essentially a bar fight, shortly before that explanation becomes necessary. 

Mac confirms that Morgan is alive, and hands Harry the keys, which he dropped during the scuffle, so now, finally, Harry and go face Victor Sells. 

Speaking of finally, I could have sworn I already posted this, and wrote the post for Chapter 24 before I sat down to discover the unfinished draft of this one. The combination of several other projects and my freelance work picking up hit me kind of sideways in the past week. Chapter 24 is already ready to go, so be looking for that on Saturday, along with an update to the progress bars on the right-hand side. The reading list has already been updated so until Saturday, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things.