Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 1

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 Grave Peril opens in the car, where Harry and the newly introduced Michael Carpenter are driving as fast as the Blue Beetle will carry them towards Cook County Hospital. Which isn't very fast. Michael says they'll get there in time "If God wills it," at Harry feels like, a pulse of energy. This is the first time in the series that we see the Power of Faith in a non-vampire context, which is good setup for all the extremely vampire context to come. There's a lot of good setup here, actually, and some great characterization through dialogue. 

Michael says he wants to ask Harry something. Harry tells Michael not to invite him to mass again. (Michael is Catholic, check.) Michael says he actually wanted to ask when Harry is planning to marry Susan. So now we know that Michael, despite the reader's never having seen him before, is close enough with Harry to be clued in about his love life. Harry kind of flails, and Michael asks if he loves her, which causes Harry to flail harder. Harry confirms that he does, but doesn't want to say it and, as they're speeding past some cops, insists that she already knows because he bought her a Hallmark card. He also points out that they've been running around the city for a month dealing with heightened ghost activity for which they have not yet found an explanation (exposition drop!) so maybe now isn't the best time. Michael pressures Harry until he says "I love her" out loud, and then he says he thought Harry might isolate himself too much, after Elaine. 

How? How does Michael know about Elaine? That was like ten years ago now, and Harry never talks about her. Given that Molly is eleven or so in this book, Michael was already married, had a young child, and was living in Chicago when Harry left DuMorne's house, but he talks about Elaine like he was there when it happened. This never gets any follow up. We know nothing about how Michael and Harry met, or when, except that Michael insisted on a soul gaze almost immediately, meaning Harry's magic had some in, and that it was almost certainly after DuMorne adopted him. My best guess is that Michael met Harry somewhere between blowing up He Who Walks Behind and the final confrontation with DuMorne, not sure which side of Harry's deal with Lea, although I'd tentatively guess at before. I don't know, obviously, what Michael was doing in Missouri, but I figure it's about 30/70 whether he was sent to do something for Harry or was there doing something completely else and just stopped to help out a slightly singed teenager walking the shoulder of I-70. Although I suppose there's also the possibility of said slightly singed teenager stopping in his panicked flight to help Michael with whatever supernatural evil he was sent there to face. 

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Michael tells Harry that if he loves Susan he should marry her, which doesn't really strike me as great advice, because I don't think love alone is sufficient reason to enter a bunch of legal and financial entanglement if it doesn't also make logistical sense, but I'm well aware that I'm the weird one here. Harry says "I'm a wizard, I don't have time to be married." and Michael responds that he's a Knight and he's married. (Michael is married, and also a knight of some kind, check). He says Harry spends too much time alone and could end up going down a dark path. Which, honestly, is fair. Humans get really weird when they don't spend enough time with other humans, although I think Michael is failing to acknowledge how much progress Harry has already made in this area. Harry takes it a little differently, though, and doesn't need to hear the conversion speech, or the "cast aside your evil powers before the consume you" speech, again. (Michael has tried to get Harry to convert, and to stop practicing magic, check. Although I note that he wasn't actually doing either thing here, and I can't think of a time when he does them in the books, unless you count when he told Harry that giving up his magic would cause Lasciel's shadow to fade, in Proven Guilty, but that doesn't strike me as quite the same thing). 

As an aside, it's established here that Michael has grey eyes, and I feel like he has brown eyes in later books, but I guess we'll see.

They get to the hospital and gear up. In Michael's case that includes a sword and a templar looking cloak fastened with a silver cross. Harry gives Michael a hard time about the cloak, because it looks silly. Michael responds by telling Harry that his coat belongs on the set of El Dorado, making him the third person in the series to do so. Harry is carrying his staff, his blasting rod, and a leather bag the contents of which we are not told. He only has two hands, so he ends up holding the bag in his teeth. They go on in, attracting a predicable amount of attention in the process, and Harry, talking around the bag, asks an extremely startled security guard for directions to the nursery. 

If I remember correctly, the plot in this book gets... weird. But it's immediately obvious that on a scene level, Jim Butcher's technical skills have leveled up substantially. We're gonna be paying more attention to technique as we go through this book. The next chapter is 22 minutes long, so it might be as much as a week before I post about it. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

Fool Moon Retrospective

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While Fool Moon has several amazingly bad sentences, the prose, as in the previous book, is better on average than the early Dresden books usually get credit for. The plot, however, is a trash can fire, especially on characterization and book-level consistency. The scene setting is effective, and I think there are more really evocative descriptions here than in Storm Front, scarlet-smeared wash of brown streaked with wet scarlet notwithstanding. But this book has the worst case of editing sickness I have ever seen. Let's review the issues I caught during the reread. 

• Harry apparently forgets, in Chapter 11, that he already ruled out the Streewolves' involvement. 
• In Chapter 12, Chauncy is mentioned but not named. He's referred to only as "the demon". 
• Harry's confusing at seeing Tera shift in Chapter 15, not being sure if he's hallucinating, even though he knows she's not human, and that this case is werewolves all the way down, may be an example of this, but it might also just be that Harry's kinda dense sometimes. 
• Chapter 17's "scarlet-smeared wash of brown streaked with wet scarlet". 
• In Chapter 18, several sentences are devoted to describing how Murphy isn't wearing any earrings, how that's unusual, clearly foreshadowing that she melted them down for ammo, but moments later, she makes a joke about telling her Aunt Edna that she'd never get any use out of them. Again, this is very much a "revised but needed smoothing" issue. The naked ears and the quip are both good artistic choices, but they don't go together. 
• Harry's nagging sense in Chapter 18 that he's "missing something" is never followed up on. 
• In Chapter 20, Harry and Inner Harry both think they kept things from Murphy, even though a) they literally did not, and b) he knew this, back in Chapter 13. 
• Mostly a timing issue, but the discussion of Tera and whether to trust her, in this same chapter, feels out of place in the trajectory of what we know about her and her actions so far. 
• When Harry is interrogating Denton in Chapter 30, he asks nearly all the same questions he already asked Harris, and they have a nearly identical exchange about power and responsibility. More damningly, Harry doesn't follow up on anything he learned from Harris, including and especially the part where Denton is the one who got them the belts, and therefore knows where they came from. 
• Not really a problem, but the soul gaze with Denton is like the ones in subsequent books, while the one with Parker is like the ones in Storm Front, and that has the same mismatched, not-smoothed-out feel. I think if this had gotten the additional round of edits it wanted, Parker's soul gaze would have been redone to match Denton's. 
• We're never told what reserve of emotion Harry taps into in Chapter 33. 

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Let this serve as a reminder that after you do a big, important, "break it open" rewrite, you need to go
through with a more delicate set of tools, clean up the dust, sand things down, make sure thee joins are all joined properly. Make sure you're not using yarn from two different dye lots. 

Almost everyone's motivations make sense this time. Marcone makes some bad decisions, like trying to hire Harry on a long term contract rather than just for this case, but they're in line with what we know about him as a person. Denton's plan is a little intricate, sure, but I get why all its parts are there. Harry actually only makes two bad decisions this book: refusing to help Kim Delaney, and burning all that magic blowing out the tires on Parker's truck, and he was high when he did that second thing. 

Murphy, though. Fuckin Muprhy. She's only slightly less weird and shitty, in absolute terms, than she was in the last book, and in relative terms this one is much worse, because she has no reason for it. Also, in the previous book, it was in service if the themes, at least, isolation and all that, and here it's actually at odds with them. Fool Moon is about trust, cooperation, closeness. Hence all the pack-hunting apex predators? It's not subtle. I think maybe Harry was supposed to keep something from Murphy, so we could play with the consequences of Our Hero failing to trust someone when he should have (and the difference between trusting someone's intent and trusting their competence), but since that's not actually here, and Harry's ability to play well with others develops pretty rapidly over the course of this book (compare him talking to Kim in the opening to talking to the Alphas in the second half), the effect is more "What to do when you're having character development and one of your closest friends isn't." 

In addition to all the words I used about Murphy in the previous retrospective: erratic, paranoid, and abusive, we can add "violent" and possibly "somewhat out of touch with reality". At one point she vaguely implies that there's a trauma thing, but it's never followed up on, and also why now?

The Loup Garou and Hexenwolf are both real folkloric monsters, although neither has quite the origin Bob asserts. "Loup Garou" is essentially just French for "werewolf", but Jim Butcher's version seems to owe more to to Cajun iteration (also known as the Rougarou), which is often the result of being cursed by a witch, although depending on depending on the version, you might also be able to become a Loup Garou on purpose (if you're a witch), having your blood drawn by one, or breaking the rules of Lent seven years in a row. Sometimes they can transform at will, sometimes it just happens, sometimes they need to eat human flesh to take wolf form. I could not find any reference to Loup Garou or Rougarou transforming at the full moon.  Rougarou are occasionally conflated with another mythological creature that eats human flesh, which I will not name here. The Hexenwolf, on the other hand, very much appears to have originated in Maryland. While online references are limited, and I was not prepared to spend several weeks tracking down the relevant library books, the hexenwolf is typically a part-wolf, part-human, standing about six feet tall. It is the mortal enemy of the marginally less obscure Snallygaster, which really feels like a missed opportunity. I can find no pre-Dresden references to Hexenwolves using a belt or other talisman to transform, although this concept certainly exists elsewhere in European werewolf lore. 

MacFinn's familial curse is a reference to the werewolves of Clan Allta, cursed by St. Natalis of Ulster so that every seven years, two members of the family turn into wolves, and have to go live in the woods. At the send of seven years, they return to human form and another pair take their place. Apparently this curse is sometimes attributed to St. Patrick instead, and it's understandable that Jim Butcher chose the guy people have like, heard of. Interestingly, the story has some additional parallels to Tera and MacFinn. The wolf approaching a potentially hostile stranger who may be able to help his (or in this case her) mate, The choice to trust the wolf in order to deliver that help. Strictly speaking, Harry doesn't bless MacFinn or perform Last Rites, but there's something similarly shaped in the way he uses his pentacle, the symbol of his faith, such as it is, to end MacFinn's suffering. The surviving wolf returns long enough to thank the priest and then vanishes into the woods, never to be seen again. 

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In the werewolf witch trials of Livonia, we see some of Butcher's basis for the Hexenwulfen and, to a lesser extent, the Alphas. People accused of being werewolves often confessed to using wolf skins to transform, sometimes given to them by a demon, but sometimes by another person. Others used rituals, or special berries, or specially prepared drinks. It was during these trials that a man escaped execution for...werewolfism by insisting that he, and other werewolves, traveled to Hell several times a year to fight witches, and the Devil. The comparison to the Alphas should be obvious, although it would also have been cool of this came up during the conversation with Chauncy. 

Susan breaking Harry out if the haze of the wolf belt by calling his name is, of course, a reference to that idea that if someone the werewolf loves and trusts (hey look, themes) calls its name (sometimes its full name), it will turn human again. 

Lycanthropy is not currently recognized as a discreet psychological disorder, but has been described as part of other conditions involving psychosis, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. It is generally considered a culture-bound syndrome, although more for its having distinct manifestations in different cultures than for only appearing at all in a few. A young woman of my acquaintance some 15 years ago, a furry, nearly lost her kids when her ex-husband attempted to convince the court that she had clinical lycanthropy. (Come to think of it, why don't any of the Streetwolves seem to have children?)

One werewolf story Jim Butcher chose not to use, that I rather wish he had, is the Wulver, a largely benevolent werewolf that catches fish. They are furry, roughly human-shaped, and have a wolf's head. They are supposed to have originated in Shetland, but debate exists about whether they are folkloric or fictional in origin. Wulver are also like, maybe fae, and it would have been interesting to throw a properly fae wolf creature in here. there is, however, something of the Wulver's tendency to look after locals (by leaving fish on their windowsills) in the Alphas' dedicated protection of the area around the university. We just don't see much of that in this book because they're still so new. 

I have been unable to narrow down Tera West's origins with any precision. Animals that take human form, including and especially for romantic purposes, are, of course, all of the place, but the only wolf I could ding in a wolf half hour of research is a Croatian story along similar lines as the Selkie. The hunter pins a she-wolf's skin to a millwheel while she's in human form, and marries her. Eventually, their children ask him where the skin is, and when they tell her, she uses it to resume her human form and vanishes, never to return. I think Tera was intended to be more along the lines of the Salish Fish Man, who takes his new wife to live with him under the sea (she's fine - they have houses and all), but she's pretty noticeably not a fish, although she very well might be Salish. I have no way of knowing if this is an "Evan isn't good enough at research" problem or a "Jim Butcher making things up" problem. If you know a story that's a closer match for Tera, please let me know in the comments. 

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And this seems like an excellent time to segue into the problematic shit roundup. In as close as I can get to chronological order without spending forever looking things up. 

• Harry feeling "weak" for asking a woman for help when he calls Susan for a ride. 
• "Like some sort of Latin goddess". Ew. 
• The first black character of the series exists only to get eaten by MacFinn. 
• Susan and Tera enjoy being the objects of sexual desire, and use their sexuality to get things they want, and the text celebrates them for it, and that's fine as far as it goes, but Benn and Lana, by contrast, openly an unabashedly want sex, and the text villainizes them, uses them as case examples for the dangers of the wolf belts and lycanthropy respectively, and then kills them. Both women also actively and deliberately interfere with their respective partner/leader's ability ti think clearly and behave reasonably at crucial moments. Benn being referred to almost exclusively by her surname, which is a conventionally masculine name with an extra letter, also feels kind of transmisogynistic, what with how she's hypersexual and an extremely literal predator and all. I also like, noticed that Tera and Susan are both women of color, while Benn and Lana are both while, but I'm unsure of how to fir that in with the rest of it. 
• Tera goddamn West. Shes the first of like, four Native characters in the whole series. She is also literally an animal and spends most of the book naked. I hope I don't need to elaborate on this. 

And now, as promised, our final set of bullet points, the list of things on which we are keeping an eye. 

• The series' difficult relationship with the law and law enforcement. 
• Susceptibility of those who serve the law to psychic trauma and manipulation. 
• Harry has a major vulnerability to things that make stuff hurt less, because he is always in serious physical and emotional discomfort. What is this doing thematically?
• The parallel development of the text's attitude towards women and Harry's attitude towards women. 
• The inadequacy of systems compared to individual judgement and action. 
• Sometimes ingredients for different potions are weirdly similar. Why?
• They "have nots" of the magical community are largely of lower socioeconomic status. Why? It makes sense that powerful magic users can make money if they want, but shouldn't there be minor practitioners who come from money? Where are they?

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We're starting to see the beginnings of series plot here. Billy and the Alphas are, of course, recurring characters going forward, and Harry has started to notice a pattern in the spoopy stuff happening around him, even if he doesn't yet have enough information to make sense of it. Susan is getting more competent, but also less careful, gearing up for her transformation in the next book and her reappearance in book 5. 

And that's what I've got for this one. We will very probably start talking about Grave Peril later this week, like maybe Thursday. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Fool Moon Chapter 34

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Harry wakes up on Marcone's lawn, which is a bit of a surprise since last he checked he'd been shot. Even
more surprisingly, Murphy is there, and she hasn't arrested him, nor does she seem to be trying to. He says he can't believe she shot him. She says he should have gotten down, even though at this point she knows why he didn't. She also knows that she did not, in fact, shoot Dresden, but has for reasons best known to herself chosen not to share that information just yet. 

Harry says "I forgive you", and when Murphy figures out what he's talking about, she gets super offended. She thinks it's unreasonable that he thought she thought he was one of the bad guys and shot him for resisting arrest. Despite the fact that almost the last thing she said to him before reappearing and pointing a gun at him was that she was staying until she could sort out who's a good guy and who isn't, and literally the last thing was "Fuck you, Harry Dresden." And like I said in the previous post, if she meant "Get down so I can shoot the guy behind you" she did the worst possible job of conveying that. A certain degree of frustration is understandable - no one likes to be misunderstood, but her reaction is all out of proportion given how very reasonable Harry's interpretation of her words and actions was. Unless this was a mind control thing, and she doesn't entirely remember what she said. In any case, she tells him to sit up and look behind him, basically letting him figure out from his ability to do so that he hasn't been shot after all, and there's Denton with a neat little hole in his forehead and a great big stick near at hand. Apparently what hit Harry was the stick. Murphy came to help after she got done doing CPR on Tera, a detail I'm almost sure is only here so we can all enjoy the mental image it creates. 

They do collect and burn the belts, so that's one less thing to worry about. Murphy has to throw them into the fire because Harry can't quite bring himself to it. It's kind of a theme, especially in the early books, that Harry is susceptible to addiction, to the wolf belts, to vampire venom, because he's walking around with an absolutely untenable amount of emotional and physical discomfort. Lara Raith calls him out on it in like, Turn Coat, and now that I'm thinking about it, so does Aurora in Summer Knight. In Ghost Story, he notes that his disembodied state doesn't actually feel "all that amazing", it just doesn't hurt. I'm not yet entirely sure what to make of this, so I guess it's another one for the "things to keep an eye on" list. 

From here, we move into a kind of montage sequence. Harry going with Murphy to Carmichael's funeral. Murphy going with Harry to Kim's. Harry and Hendricks in the ambulance, where the latter turns out not to be dead after all - he was wearing kevlar. Marcone was arrested but nothing stuck (I...think the only crime he actually committed here was having the Streetwolves kidnap Harry?), and he calls Harry to try the "you owe me your life, come work for me" thing. Harry points out that he also saved Marcone's life. 

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Susan, who absolutely did not tale take the opportunity to run (I hope she at least took the Alphas back to the van first), got decent footage of the final confrontation with the Loup Garou, and it was on the news for two whole days before mysteriously disappearing, gaining her enough attention to get her column syndicated, and making Murphy, who shot MacFinn on reflex after Harry did the thing, but before he reverted to human form, look sufficiently heroic that Internal Affairs was pressured to drop the investigation. 

Harry and Tera meet up at Wolf Lake Park. She's wearing a cloak, likely in deference to Dresden's human weirdness about nudity, and says that she's there to say goodbye. Harry asks if she'll call, and she says it's not the way of her people, but he should come to the Cascades (she says "the great mountains of the Northwest") some winter. Then she drops the cloak, turns into a wolf, and walks away, leaving Harry to deal with the realization that she's a wold who can take human form, not the other way around, and the reader to wonder why, if her base form is the wolf, she apparently shifted to human after losing consciousness during her fight with MacFinn. (And she definitely was in human form after. Murphy says she did CPR on a naked woman, not a wolf.)

Harry sits at home considering how Denton and Victor Sells both had benefactors with greater knowledge of the supernatural. I don't think this was actually mentioned in Storm Front, but whatever, Harry's had six months to think about it. He notes further that someone must have pointed him out to Denton, and on the basis of all this information, concludes that someone might be trying to kill him. He's wrong, of course, or at least not entirely right, but it's not a bad guess, given what he knows at this point. 

We get a little bit more evidence that Mister is part Malk, here at the end. Apparently he can recognize phone numbers and has opinions about Harry's social life, because when Harry goes to call Susan, he purrs "approvingly". 

Wow, yeah. We got through a whole 'nother book. 34 chapters, and the tiniest hint of series plot right at the end. Expect the retrospective post later this week. It will contain, among other things, a codified list of the things we're keeping an eye on. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Dresden Files Reread - Fool Moon Chapter 33

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 Harry steps over the dead bodies of the Hexenwulfen as he makes his way back through the woods. Benn's belt has dissolved into inexplicably greenish ectoplasm, apparently having released the spirit it carried, or otherwise failed, when she died. This can't be a question of the item being bonded to its original owner, or Harry would have had an unpleasant surprise upon Harris's death. It's possible that the belts die when their most recent wearer does, but were that the case, Wilson would have had his own puddle of goo, and there's no mention of any such thing. Presumably, then, the belts only dissolve if the wearer actually dies when transformed. Which means that Harry left Harris's, Wilson's, and Denton's belts just lying around loose on Marcone's estate. I'd have assumed Marcone would have the sense to dispose of them properly, but obviously in light of the events of Battle Ground, we can no longer assume any such thing. 

Marcone is still dangling where Harry left him, and Harry notes that his position has to be extremely painful. He finds the far end of the rope holding Marcone up, where it's tied around another tree, and starts letting it out slowly, lowering him to where he should be able to swing over the pit and get his feet on the ground. He considers grabbing Marcone, finding Murphy, and just getting out of there, but that would leave MacFinn on the loose for the rest of the night, and he's not prepared to risk the loss of life that could entail. While he doesn't come out and say it, I suspect he's also unwilling to leave MacFinn with the guilt of the people he might kill, the taste of blood in his mouth, after his own experience with the belt. 

He lets the rope out enough, ties it to the tree again, and goes to help Marcone get his balance on the edge and untie him. Unfortunately, the Loup Garou has once again used that distressingly human-like intelligence, and is hiding in the pit, waiting for them. As soon as it sees Harry, or at least as soon as Harry sees it, it starts just fuckin' climbing out of the pit, straight up the side. Harry attempts to fuego it, and gets a puff of hot air and a splitting headache for his trouble. So he runs, as far as he can before his body physically refuses to continue and slows him to a walk. Which isn't very far. Harry is just, absolutely out of resources, mentally, physically, emotionally, and magically. He stops, turns to face the Loup Garou, and readies his death curse, hoping to break the curse on MacFinn, or maybe put an end to Marcone's criminal empire. He pulls out his pentacle...and realizes that it's inherited silver. He isn't out of options yet after all. I think this is also the first mention of death curses in the series. 

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He takes the necklace off and starts spinning it above his head, calling up a small circle to contain the  magic he's trying to use until he's ready to release it. But he will need some magic to make this work, and he's mostly out. Harry is at this point under the impression that the reason dark magic is easier is that it comes from "negative" emotions like anger, lust, and greed. I'm assuming that this is an instance of Harry being young, and not as well-versed in magical theory as he thinks he is, because in later books he uses both anger and lust to power constructive magic. But just at present, he thinks he needs some purer emotion to use "good" magic, which makes it as good as true. Eventually, after reflecting on where his magic does come from, the emotions and convictions that fuel it, he finds "something" that isn't completely exhausted. We're not told what it is - I don't know if that's another editing error, or if we're meant to be able to intuit it, but if it's the latter, I, at least, can't figure it out. Whatever it is, though, he pours it into the magic, readying a wind spell to launch the pentacle at MacFinn. 

So naturally, this is when Murphy shows up, stepping between Harry and the Loup Garou, and telling him to - actually, I think we need the quote here. She says, "Harry, get down on the ground. Right now." she says it in a "very calm tone" while pointing a gun at Harry. This is obviously calculated to make it seem like she'd decided, once again, to arrest him right this very second, despite how wildly inappropriate that is under the circumstances. Like, it's unambiguous, and she has zero reason to expect that Harry will find another way to interpret her words and actions here. 

And indeed, he takes it at face value, although it wouldn't necessarily have mattered if he didn't. He can't speak or otherwise interrupt what he's doing, or the energy for the spell will be lost, and he has neither the time nor the wherewithal to try again. So he keeps on with it, hoping he'll be able to finish before Murphy shoots him. She tries to couple more times to convince him to get down, and then everyone's out of time. The Loup Garou charches, Murphy fires, and Harry launches the amulet. 

The spell, inherited silver empowered by his magic and his will, tears the Loup Garou's wolf form apart, leaving only MacFinn, with Harry's pentacle still embedded in his chest. He smiles at Harry, and then he dies. Harry himself loses consciousness a moment later. 

This was the second to last chapter of Fool Moon - after the next post, we'll be done with this one, and ready to move on to Grave Peril. (Although we'll probably have a retrospective about this one first.) I'll try not to keep you waiting too long. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Fool Moon Chapter 32

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 Murphy says she wishes they'd had more time to talk things through. I have no idea what she thought could still happen in the way of productive discussion - "I'm incapable of trusting you and I think the only productive resolution to this situation involves arresting everyone" doesn't leave room for any response other than "Well okay then, wish you didn't feel that way" and I don't think it would help anything for her to keep elaborating on how much she doesn't trust Harry, but maybe she really did have something to add, or there was something Dresden could have said that would have changed things. 

Tera covers Marci's eyes (at least, I think it's Marci), and tells her not to look. 

Harry has the thought that they're all going to die "because of him", but then goes into how it's unfair, because they've come so far and because he didn't do anything grossly stupid. He literally knows that this isn't actually his fault, it's just an automatic thought, something he could probably clear up with a few months of cognitive behavioural therapy if he could afford it. This raises the question of where exactly he picked up this habit of self-blame. It wasn't there in the flashbacks to his life with DuMorne. 13 year old Harry was a little confused about the normal amount of violence to expect from an adult caregiver, but he doesn't see DuMorne's quick, corrective, violence, or the more prolonged and less predictable attacks from previous foster parents as something he caused. I'd have to check whether he's doing it in "A Restoration of Faith" but I think he is. This leaves essentially three possibilities, all of which are interesting. Wait, four possibilities. Three and a half? 

This could be something he picked up from Nick Christian, when he was apprenticed at Ragged Angel Investigations - Nick definitely has some kinda misplaced sense of responsibility, although we don't know if it's this exact shape. It could be something Ebenezer caused, intentionally or not, in the course of everything he tried to teach Harry about taking responsibility for his emotions, his actions, and his magic. Ebenezer's own tendency is to have a very internalized locus of control, but also a strong sense of self-justification. He's willing to accept blame, but he doesn't feel bad about many of his actions (there are exceptions, and they get a lot of attention, but you can see quite a few places where he clearly needs to feel like what he did was right, or at least the rightest thing he could do under the circumstances). Even if "Blame yourself for everything, Harry - if you're standing there when it happens, if you're anywhere near it, it's your fault" isn't what he meant, it would be very easy for a traumatized teenager to take it that way. 

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And speaking of traumatized teenagers, this could obviously be related to the end of Harry's time with Du Morne, to the things with Elaine, and He Who Walks Behind. This is where we find that awkward "and a half". This could be regular trauma, survivor's guilt and all that, but it could also be related to that like, scar on his aura from the confrontation with He Who Walks Behind - psychic trauma. I find this possibility the most interesting, in terms of series plot, because this is the vulnerability that the fallen angel exploits in Changes, "And it was all your fault, Harry". Obviously, even if the self-blame thing in the early books is psychic trauma, that doesn't mean there's any causal relationship, beyond perhaps the fallen angel seeing a weak spot in Harry's defenses and taking advantage of it. But so far, we have very little idea how, if at all, Down Below relates to Outside (except that some Denarians, including Nicodemus, are not arrayed with the Adversary). So even this scanty evidence of coordination is intriguing. 

Harry yells up at Marcone, a pretty desperate idea considering he's drawing the Loup Garou's attention, and that last we checked Marcone was unconscious, but it's infinitely preferable to standing around doing nothing and waiting to die. 

And as it turns out, Marcone is awake, and able to move an arm. He has a little fun with Harry, being like "The knife you saw earlier? They found it and took it off me." before revealing that he has another knife that they didn't find, and sets to squirming around into a position where he can use it. Murphy insists that he's just going to cut himself loose and leave them there, which is one of the most reasonable things she's said all book. She's wrong, obviously, but not trusting the literal crime lord is at least understandable. Marcone, out of either a sense of honor or an awareness that he's in more danger untied without backup than staying strung up a little longer while his allies, be they ever so temporary and uneasy, are free to act, throws the knife, cutting one of the ropes near where it's anchoring the platform to a pine tree, so the length of the rope hangs into the put, allowing Dresden and the others to climb out. 

The Loup Garou jumps at Harry when he's most of the way up, forcing him to drop several feet back down, but Marcone distracts it, pulling the probability slider several notches closer to "honor" than "practicality". 

Photo by Jannik Selz on Unsplash

Even as a ravening beast, MacFinn is smart enough to recognize that the target currently dangling from a
rope probably isn't going anywhere, and he goes after Harry again as soon as he's out of the pit. Harry gets out of the way, barely (after inherited silver, a Loup Garou's biggest weakness seems to be its own momentum), and Tera, who got up the rope considerably faster than Harry did, says she'll deal with MacFinn, and tells Harry to go after Denton. 

Now, finally, after like four chapters of hinting, readers who didn't know or guess the nature of Harry's "ace in the hole" learn that it is, in fact, Harris's belt. I'm not sure why this struck Harry as a good idea, or even a not-unacceptable idea - I'm pretty sure Bob warned him that the belts can mess with your head and are generally inadvisable, but heck, maybe it's already started to mess with his head. I don't know. Certainly, once it's on, it feels like a pretty good idea. Harris wasn't exaggerating with the drug comparison. In addition to the obvious and expected effects: turning into a wolf, heightened senses, a desire to go kill things, there's a euphoric sense of "rightness". Some of this is probably just a massive dopamine rush, but it's making me wonder about the lycanthropes. Bob said they're a natural channel for the same kind of spirits of bestial rage that inhabit the belts. The belts physically transform the wearer, but the lycanthropes can't shapeshift. Should they be able to? Is part of why they seem to be having such a bad time like, species dysphoria? Should someone be teaching them how to do the wolf thing the Alphas do? Hell, is there a case for a compassionate use exception to the Second Law, so someone else could turn them into wolves, the way the Fourth Law allows sleep spells on people dealing with psychic damage? File under "Things Unlikely To Get Any Proper Follow Up". Anyway, Harry is suddenly having a great time. 

The first hexenwulf he finds is not Denton, but Benn. Harry takes a chunk out of her throat, hamstrings her. Wilson tries to come to her defense, but she snaps at him in her distress, and he kills her on instinct. Harris arrives, in human form of course, since Harry's got his belt, and opens fire on Wilson, assuming he's one of the Alphas. The wounded Wilson takes his belt off and shoot back, even as Harris realizes what he's done. It's a bad time for everyone, and Harry leaves all three hexenwulfen dead on the ground, even though he barely had to life a finger (a paw?) to make it happen, since he didn't personally kill any of them, which neatly sidesteps the issue of whether doing so would have been a violation of the First Law. 

Photo by Guillaume Archambault on Unsplash.

Harry feels a sense of kinship with Denton, now that they're both wearing the belts. The fight is vicious  but utterly without malice and is described so as to suggest an almost balletic formality. This is a ritual. Denton, stronger but slower (hi there, '90s fiction tactical and moral superiority of speed), makes the first mistake, and Harry gets him bleeding, making the rest of the fight mostly a question of not doing anything stupid until Denton loses enough blood to become an easy target. There's a kind of irritated regret that Denton insisted on making this a fight - Harry is pretty sure that if Denton had submitted to him instead of, recognizing Harry's authority without resistance, Harry would have accepted him as a follower. This brief fantasy transitions very naturally into a consideration of how he could make more of the belts, give them to a few other people, give one to Susan so they could hunt together. Because Harry is so incredibly isolated that that even in the thrall of a real live cursed object, all he's thinking about is how much nicer it would be to bring his friends along. 

Denton returns to human form so he can beg for his life, which Harry is not especially inclined to grant. But he hesitates, and he's annoyed that he's hesitating. He knows that killing Denton this way will change him, deeply and irrevocably, and in the moment he feels like that's a good thing. 

But, 'cause we gotta work in one more werewolf myth before the end, Susan says his name. She's scared of him, and that realization eventually snaps him out of it. He takes the belt off, throws it away, does the same thing with Denton's. Susan tries to go to him, but he tells her not to touch him. He's understandably horrified by the headspace he was just in, by the fact that he was about to kill a guy with his teeth. He's probably still got Denton's blood in his mouth. He's also experiencing a kind of hyper-acute withdrawal from the belt, and I think he feels like that sense of loss and incompleteness, the initial struggle to cope with the sudden return of pain and fatigue, is personal weakness rather than just like, neurochemistry. 

Susan seems to have some sense of what's going on, at least in the ways that matter, and says they need to get Harry away from the situation, but there's no time to do that, or even discuss it, before Murphy shows up, along with the Alphas. Obviously Harry isn't gonna do the emotional vulnerability thing in front of Murphy, so he tells her and Susan to take the Alphas and get the hell out of dodge. Murphy refuses, and says she still needs to "sort out who is a good guy and who isn't". She also notes that Harry has blood all over his mouth, so, good to have that confirmed. When it becomes clear that Murphy means to be recalcitrant, he tells Susan to get the kids back to the van, and when she starts to argue he screams at her. She leaves. 

Photo by Neil Rosentech on Unsplash

Harry and Murphy hear what sure sounds like Tera going down in her fight with MacFinn, and Murphy asks "What do we do?" Gods, I think she has been tampered with. Any time she's faced with it directly, she insists that she can't trust Harry, that her only viable option is to arrest everyone, but when she's not immediately reaction to someone asking her to trust Harry or stop trying to arrest people, she's totally normal. She's concerned about Harry, and she defaults to the tactical "we", the assumption that they're working together. Hell, back at MacFinn's house, the last thing Harry says before she starts hitting and arresting him is "you've got to believe me". If someone just put a decontextualized "don't trust the wizard" in her head, it might look like this, and the desire to arrest everyone and sort them out in a controlled environment may be a natural response to the confusion that would cause. We see something similar in Wheel of Time with the "don't trust Aes Sedai" compulsion Morgase got hit with. She's fully capable of trusting Aes Sedai as long as she's not confronted directly with the choice to do that or not. 

Harry says they should split up, that whoever gets past the Loup Garou should help Marcone, who did just kinda save their lives, while the other keeps the Loup Garou busy, Murphy tells him this feels like a setup, Harry points out that his first suggestion was actually for her to go back to the van, where it's safe, and refrains from pointing out, or maybe doesn't ask, that she literally just asked him what they should do. You see what I mean?

I genuinely can't account for how long this got, although maybe it will become clear when I'm typing it up. (Update: it did not). We're properly into Frantic Catch Up Season now, so the next post should be sometime in the soonish. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!