Storm Front Retrospective

Photo by Michael D on Unsplash

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!