Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 37

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Harry is angrier than he expects to be at Kyle's attack, which he attributes to the influence of eating Kravos. In a fit contrariness so quintessentially Harry that it's honestly reassuring, rather than immediately reducing Kyle to a greasy spot on the floor, a fate he has uneqivocally earned several times over, Harry gives Kyle the chance to walk away. Kyle declines, validly reasoning that this is probably a bluff on Harry's part, although he says something about "no more illusions" and I'm not actually sure what he's talking about. So far as I can recall, Harry hasn't even used regular deception in dealing with the vampires this book, much less illusions. Kelly rushes Harry, but he throws her into the far wall with a blast of wind. Kyle goes for Harry's throat, but Susan steps in and throws him into the wall... with her bare hands. Maddened by pain and injury, they start attacking each other. I'm almost sure this is supposed to be symbolism, but I'm not quite sure of what. I do, however, quite like that Harry was the one to throw Kelly into the wall while Susan got Kyle - it's a small thing, but Kelly has consistently been the more active problem for Harry, and it's good to see that Named Minor Antagonist Barbie and Ken here weren't positioned to avoid Harry Hitting a Girl or Susan doing anything that might strike a misogynistic reader as emasculating. That kind of thing is very easy to fall into by accident, which gives the impression it was deliberately avoided here. Harry uses one of Kravos's spells to set them on fire, including an incantation he presumably got from Kravos's memories. "Satharak na-kadum" yields no search results not related to the Dresden Files, so I've got nothing on the meaning, but there's a Satharak Industries in Tamil Nadu, India, so the language here is maybe meant to be Tamil? Classical Tamil, as the name implies, stands alongside Classical Greek, Latin, and Hebrew among the, y'know, classical languages, making it an appropriate and respectable choice for a spellcasting language, but one of the things we're gonna be keeping an eye on, largely starting with the next book when the world of wizards, specifically, starts opening up to the reader, is what languages are used this way, and by whom, and the grossest human magic user we've met so far using Tamil while Harry uses Latin does not look like a great start. Although Victor Sells seems to have used a quasi-Latin very similar to Harry's, so there's that. 

As Kyle and Kelly burn to death, their screams sound like tearing sheet metal, but also like terrified children. I have to figure at least some of that is Harry's own guilt about the human kids who (might have) died when he let loose at Bianca's party. They take their time about dying, too, especially compared to my recollection of other times Harry kills Red Court vampires with fire. Maybe Kravos's notion of a fire spell is meant to cause more suffering, maybe it just doesn't get as hot. You can't do anything with magic that you don't believe in, even when you're borrowing someone else's power, but it's understandable that Harry would want any Reds here, and maybe these two in particular, to hurt before they died. I don't think he would have done it like that if he'd been making a more considered choice. He doesn't feel great about it, but tries to remind himself that they're vampires, monsters. Susan, meanwhile, has to take a second to remind herself that she isn't a vampire, after using her new superstrength like that. 

They proceed through the basement, through a room with a drain in the floor, which holds the corpses of some of the human kids from the party, and some of the missing homeless people we were told about back in Chapter 12. Harry extends his magical senses to confirm that they're all beyond saving. They show no lividity, indicating that they were exanguinated - and that Harry examines them rather more thoroughly than is described, since none of them are naked as far as we're told, and you have to check the skin for that. Either he looked under someone's clothes, or a body was left facedown and he lifted it or turned it over to check the face. A hose off to one side drips water, indicating that it was used to clean up after the vampires fed. I like how this detail underscores the vampires' evil and their own fundamental inhumanity at the same time. There's something almost industrial about this approach to eating - it lacks the sexy predator intimacy fiction so often ascribed to being fed upon by a vampire. It's tidy, sort of, it's efficient. It shows how little regard the vampires have for their human prey. But it's also not how people eat. This is how you feed wild carnivores in captivity. It situates the vampires as not just inhuman but subhuman, and simultaneously establishes that they see actual humans as something even less than that. Harry announces that he'll stop them, that he can't just stay out of it after what he's seen. 

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Justine tries to argue with him, but he dismisses her when his wizard senses pick something up across the room. His shield bracelet, his blasting rod, and Bob the skull are all on a shelf tucked into an alcove, with his staff wedged into a corner, where Bianca stashed them after being warned by Bob that if she or her people messed with them, they might explode. I don't know by what exact mechanism Bob determines whether someone is his new owner when he's out of Harry's immediate physical control, but she doesn't seem to have gotten him out of the backpack, so he must have acted pretty fast there. Bob observes that Harry looks grim, despite wearing boxers with yellow duckies on them, and that his aura looks like Kravos's, although Harry doesn't let him finish that part. Harry puts on the bracelet and grabs the rest of his gear, handing Bob to Justine. Since Bob is Bob and Justine is naked except for Susan's cloak, he starts making comments, but banter time is cut abruptly short when they realize Susan has disappeared. 

Justine says the vampires are here, that they just can't see them. Bob says "What's this 'we' stuff, kimosabe'" and scans for veils. Now, to be clear, this is the kind of thing people did absolutely just like, say, in the year 2000. Period typical racism or whatever. But could we not. Could we just...could we not? Like if I wanted to be really, really generous I could make the case that the magic skull with no grasp of good and evil and a limited grasp of the difference between fiction and reality probably doesn't really know what racism is and would struggle to understand why he shouldn't do it, much less extend that understanding to adjusting his tendency to communicate in pop culture references. But that's the kind of thing a book has to actually do, and ideally interrogate, not just leave as a possible interpretation, in order to get credit for it. Anyway, Bob doesn't see any veils, and didn't see Susan leave or anyone come in to take her. Harry starts talking it through, and rapidly realizes that it doesn't actually make sense for them to have snuck in, taken Susan, and not, for example, murdered him or also taken Justine, especially now that Susan has superstrength and can make herself rather difficult to drag off, should she be so inclined. Justine volunteers that Bianca could have mind controlled Susan into leaving under her own power, as this is how she got her into the laundry room. This suggests that Bianca has at least some ability to use magic, which is not an encouraging proposition. For the moment, there's nothing for it but to keep walking. 

They reach the stairs, with open doors at the top leading outside. There might as well be a glowing neon sign at the top of those stairs reading TRAP, but Harry's newly restored strength won't last forever, and waiting until dawn will just move the fight inside, so he leaves Bob with Justine, telling him to help her if he can, and starts climbing. At the top, Bianca waits for him, with Susan kneeling at her side, a dozen vampires in their true forms arrayed behind her, and about half as many mildly enthralled men with machine guns in front. Harry laughs, and says she must think he's very dangerous, to do all this just for him. She confirms that she does, and tells the gunmen to open fire. 

So this didn't come together quite as fast as I'd hoped, but at least it wasn't an entire month this time. I'm still getting back up to speed after being sick, and honestly I've been a little distracted trying to get the latest chapter of my fanfic up before Season 3 of Wheel of Time is released on the 13th. The next post here will probably be me finally doing my second Likes and Reservations post for Season 2, so you may not get another Dresden post until after the ides of March, but we'll see. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 36

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It's not clear whether Kravos comes for Harry immediately, or if at the start his nightmares are his own, but whichever the case, it doesn't take long for the sorcerer to show up. He starts taunting Harry from the shadows, talking about how he watched the vampires take him, how he wishes he'd taped it so he could show Harry. Harry talks back, and Kravos hits him, hard, tell him jokes won't save him now. Harry, naturally, continues talking back, accusing him of cliches. This gets Kravos to come out of the mist and slam him into the ground. He's sitting on Harry's chest, which makes him at minimum the third thing to do that this book. Symbolism. He looks basically like he did in life - thin face, graying hair, awful beard, broad shoulders, ritual symbols all over his chest. Which I think speaks to a level of self-awareness of Jim Butcher's part that he doesn't always get credit for. Aside from the symbols being in blood, rather than tattoos, I have met like, twelve of this guy, and been inappropriately hit on by at least four of him. This is a very specific subtype of That Asshole in Your Local Pagan Community. Like every incarnation of this shithead I've met, he takes himself extremely seriously, and the more Dresden makes it clear that he doesn't take Kravos seriously, the more agitated he becomes. Eventually Harry makes a remark about how perhaps the Ken doll he used to bind Kravos worked so well because it was anatomically correct, and Kravos loses it, starts choking Harry to death. I know this is a life or death situation, but one would still prefer that we hadn't gone with what is, essentially, an anti-intersex joke here. To be clear, I am not of that school of thought which believes that jokes about small hands, small penises, short stature, and the like are only hurtful to those whose own beliefs prejudice them against such traits, and therefore fair game. Were Harry Dresden a real person, I might be inclined to grant him some leeway for his having just personally gone through a horrific trauma that he has been conditioned by the society in which he lives to regard as deeply emasculating, However, Harry is a fictional character, and Jim Butcher had both time to think and the emotional wherewithal to make better choices. 

Harry does die here, although there are some marked differences between this death and the one in Changes. There is, explicitly, no light, train-associated or otherwise, and no "kindly, beckoning voice". There's nothing, in fact, except a sensation like being pressed into, and through, plastic wrap. Then he feels a thudding on his chest, and the plastic wrap pulls away as his heart starts back up. Susan did CPR, just like they planned, and it worked. Crucially, because Harry is a wizard and died suddenly and violently at a time when the veil between worlds is turbulent, his brief death created a ghost. Ghost Harry observes that they look like hell, and offers regular Harry - well, Dream Harry, a hand up. I feel like there's some lesson to be had in "I offered myself a hand up, so I took it," but I don't think Harry gets it until maybe Death Masks. Ghost Harry is a little stronger than regular Harry, and between the two of them they're able to restrain Kravos. 

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Harry extends his dream-self's hands into claws, his face into a muzzle. The book doesn't say so explicitly,
but I am nearly certain these features are borrowed from the wolf form he took when he used the wolf belt in Fool Moon. Thus armed, he physically eviscerates Kravos and starts to eat him. In case we missed the metaphor, it says explicitly that Harry "wolfed into his vitals". He consumes his stolen magic, and then Kravos's own power as well. He eats his heart. This is how we close out the Little Red Riding Hood allusion from Chapter 26. In the discussion of that chapter, I mentioned that modern revisionist retellings sometimes include Red Riding Hood claiming her own wildness and engaging with the wolf on her own terms. That's what Harry's doing here. He is violently, physically reclaiming his power after being violated by Kravos in Chapter 17 and by Bianca in Chapter 33. He's embracing his capacity for violence and destruction. He's literally partly transformed into a wolf. This does not entirely bode well for Our Hero's psychological health, but it sure is good writing. I mean damn. 

When it's done, and the last bits of dream blood and dream viscera have faded from the scene, Ghost Harry puts his hand on regular Harry's shoulder and tells him it's over, he got Kravos. He also reassures him that ghost Kravos wasn't a real person, and that even on the scale of ghosts he was a "bad egg", that he doesn't have anything to regret. Harry says that's easy for Ghost Harry to say, since he doesn't have to live with himself. Ghost Harry is, in fact, already fading out, the unfinished business that brought him into existence completed. 

Harry wakes up, almost painfully full of energy after taking back much of his own magic and all of Kravos's. He assures Susan that she did her part of the plan exactly right. She's naturally a little concerned that he's suddenly able to move under his own power, and he explains that the extra magic is a kind of high - he still feels pain, but it's not important. He tells Susan to get some clothes on Justine so they can get out of there, but Susan says she won't come out from behind the washing machine. So Harry uses a gust of magical wind to physically get her out, and Susan puts her cloak on her. I don't think this is a Tam Lin reference, but we got one earlier so naturally I'm on alert for anyone putting their cloak on anyone else. Then Harry just blows out the locked door of the laundry room. And destroys a couple lightbulbs in the next room. He tells Susan and Justine to get behind him, not so he can stand between them and the forces of darkness but to keep them out of his line of fire. It accomplishes both, though, because as soon has he steps through the door, Kyle and Kelly Hamilton grab him, and announce their intent to find out what a wizard's blood tastes like. 

I am so sorry this took so long. I got Covid, which I haven't had before, and found the experience thoroughly unpleasant. One of my in-laws has never been all that diligent about precautions, and infected someone I live with, after which there's only so much one can do. Assuming I don't get any more potentially deadly diseases, my commitment to trying to go faster between here and the end of this book stands. You might reasonably expect another post within the next week. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 35

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Susan finds the dried blood on Harry's arm, tastes it. She's quite...enthusiastic about it, but Harry pulls away, backs up, and throws the bloodstained towel at her, which she begins to lick, trying to get the blood she needs out of the fabric. I gotta note here that most of the blood on that towel is in the form of bloody vomit, the result of Harry's mushroom poisoning, so what she's licking off that towel is just, dazzlingly gross, and I'm not surprised that it doesn't provide the nourishment she's after. Honestly I'm a little surprised it doesn't make her sick, but I guess it's not that much blood, and even a half-turned vampire probably has more physical resilience than a human. 

Harry asks Justine, who has gone back to hiding behind the washing machine, what they should do, and she says there's nothing to do - Susan will kill them, and once she does, she'll be gone, wholly replaced by her vampiric nature, and come into her full power as a vampire of the Red Court. She confirms that right now, the real Susan is still there, but even if Harry is able to get through to her, her bloodlust will continue to grow until she loses control and eats someone. She suggests that they could kill Susan now, while she's new and weak, before the hunger makes her desperate, but Harry isn't gonna do that, and Justine has an emotion about his refusal that Harry can't readily classify as "warm" or "heated". We'll come back to this in a minute, but I think it's interesting how this scene displays Harry not being a leader. In this particular tough spot, the first thing it occurs to him to do, after the trick with the towel, is ask a relative stranger what they should do. I don't mean that derogatorily, to be clear. Different people have different skill sets, and crisis leadership isn't among Harry's, especially at this stage. When he's had time to come up with a plan, he can direct its execution just fine, and his planning gets faster as time goes on. But so very often, texts treat leadership as an aspect of competence that must naturally occur at the intersection of "man" and "protagonist", and I quite like that Dresden Files doesn't do this. Harry's thinking as fast as he can here, but he's not taking charge. This willingness to express uncertainty, to defer to someone else's even slightly greater understanding of a situation, also helps set up, for the next book, the contrast between Harry and the rest of the White Council. Heck, arguably it helps set up his getting his mother's knowledge of the Ways from Lea in...oh, in Changes, at the opposite end of the war arc. In some ways then, this is supposed to reassure us that with the Winter Mantle and everything, Harry is going to be okay, he's not going to lose himself, because we already saw him hold onto these essential positive qualities of collaboration and humility in the face of several substantial increases in personal power that might reasonably have eroded them. Also, I would love to know if this "You're not a full vampire until the first lethal feeding" thing also applies to the Black Court. It doesn't necessarily matter, but this seems like it may be part of why these three very different types of creature are all classified as "vampires", despite differing in their diets, physical nature, abilities, and means of reproduction.

Susan, getting tired of the towel, makes eye contact with Harry and tries to mesmerize him. He's able to pull away pretty easily, since she's not a full vampire and he is a full Wizard with years of deliberate practice building up his will, but it gives him an idea. Susan soul gazed him, shortly before the start of the series, and memories of a soul gaze can't be removed, since the soul gaze is technically a manifestation of the Sight. Lea could have obscured those memories, but she can't have taken them away. He plucks a hair from Susan's head, wraps it around his right hand (power hand) and spits on his fingers, then takes hold of her left hand (receiving hand). The left and right correspondences are not actually explicated here, but this is a pretty standard aspect of 20th century magical theory (it may be older than that - the claims theosophy, Thelema, and Wicca made to ancient origins have obscured the readily accessible record on such points; let me know in the comments if you want me to get in there and figure out where and when this one actually originated). The touch, the sympathetic physical materials, allow him to amplify the natural bond between them, the one created by their regular human intimacy with each other, making it a channel for his magic. He calls up his own memories of his time with Susan, and tries to press them into her mind, but Lea apparently anticipated his trying something like this, and her spell actually forms a barrier, thin and flexible, but becoming rigid when strained, preventing the memories from getting through. Susan leans in and starts licking Harry's neck. Then she bites him - not that hard, but Harry is nonetheless acutely aware that she is a half-turned vampire and she's biting him, and probably would be even if her saliva weren't making his skin go numb. She's figured out that the blood she wants is inside Harry. So Harry starts talking, about how he can't lose her, he needs her, she could give herself amantin poisoning if she feeds upon him... and then he says "I love you." and the spell breaks through. There's a little bit here about how some words have a power that has nothing to do with magic, but of course we know from Fool Moon that "There's more magic in a baby's first giggle than in any firestorm a wizard can conjure up", and this likely works on the same principle. With the barrier broken, Susan's own memories are pulled back out of Lea into her, and she is herself again, give or take the vampire thing. 

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She's still pretty much about to bite him, and starts talking about how much she want it (implicitly, his
blood), how he's weak and sick and she could take it, he couldn't stop her. Harry just...agrees, in some cases reflecting her words back ("You couldn't stop me. You're weak, sick." "I couldn't stop you."). I... don't know if he would actually have just let her eat him, here. Honestly I don't think he knows either. But here again, he doesn't seem to feel any need to assert himself. She asks him to "Say it again" and after a second of confusion her tells her, again, that he loves her. The words seem to hit her like a physical blow, and he says it again, and when she looks into his eyes, her eyes are hers. "Dark, rich, warm brown, bloodshot, filled with tears." That's a good sequence of descriptors right there, starting with the strictly physical, moving though the symbolic, "rich" and "warm brown" (in this context clearly meant to suggest emotions of warmth as well as physical color), to the situational. The words and phases mostly get longer as the sentence progresses. This is something writers are taught not to do, because the transition from longer words, phrases, or sentences to shorter increases tension, impact, while moving from shorter to longer does the opposite, and kind of verbal-emotional righty tighty lefty loosey. However, within this moment, that loosening is earned and effective - the relative untidiness of "filled with tears" compared to "dark" reminds us that we are, in fact, in a mess, but that same looseness creates a sense of open endedness, even of possibility. He fills her in on the events she missed, including his best guess that no one is coming for them in any kind of useful timeframe. She says "We've got to get you out of here." and this, to me, is part of the payoff for "What do we do?" and "I couldn't stop you." It's a direct echo of Harry saying the same thing to her at the party, after Lea took her memories, and it helps underscore that their relationship is healthy, balanced, good for Harry, probably good for both of them. "We've got to get you out of here" is something heroes say to damsels in distress, and I just, I love that they can trade those roles back and forth as the situation calls for. 

Unfortunately, getting Harry out of here is complicated by the fact that he used up the last of his reserves on the spell to restore her memory. He's not sure he can walk, much less break down a door and fight his way out through a building full of vampires. Susan asks if it would help if he slept, but of course, as he says, if he did that, Kravos would immediately enter is dreams and start fulfilling those threats about making his last moments a nightmare that lasts for years. But, as Harry apparently told Molly off-screen sometime between the end of Proven Guilty and the end of Cold Days, if you have one problem, you have a problem, if you have two problems, you might have options. In this case, he's got about four problems. He asks if Susan can keep control for a couple of hours, while he sleeps. Susan reminds him that he just said Kravos would kill him, and Harry says he's counting on it.

We're very close to the end of this book. I'm going to try to write a little faster so we don't all forget what's going on between these last few chapters. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 34

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Harry, struggling to wake up after his ordeal, thinks about his father. This, if I remember rightly, is our first real information about him. He was a stage magician, good, according to Harry (who was like six at the time of his father's death and not necessarily objective), but too charitable to ever be very financially successful, although it is worth noting here that in the late 1970s, people employed full time in "amusement and recreation industries" made, on average, in the neighborhood of $10,000 a year, about the same as teachers, a bit more than hotel workers and a bit less than auto mechanics. In today's money, that's about $48,388.50 (although differences in cost of living make accurate comparison difficult), enough to live on in the less expensive parts of Missouri, but hardly in line with conventional notions of "making it big". Harry spent his earliest years sleeping in the back of his father's station wagon, which is interesting inasmuch as it means that even during his very earliest years, when he still felt safe and okay and had a living parent, he didn't have a home in the conventional sense. I'd be genuinely interested to know if that station wagon had any kind of threshold worth talking about. Also of interest here, Harry started having nightmares shortly before his father died. Harry isn't particularly sensitive, magically speaking, and he doesn't have any innate capacity for prescience beyond the limited amount that all wizards seem to possess, although I believe it's implied throughout the series that children are broadly more sensitive than adults. We know Malcolm's death wasn't natural, but don't have any of the particulars, so we're left with four possibilities that I can think of. 1. Little Harry was just more sensitive than grownup Harry is. 2. Someone or something was actively trying to warn him, but the message didn't get through very clearly. 3. Whatever got Malcolm has some specific tendency to cause nightmares in people near its victims when it's like, approaching. 4. Whatever got Malcolm was just so fundamentally big or spooky that it caused a serious disturbance in the force. 

Harry wakes up dizzy, nauseated, wracked by abdominal cramps, and in considerable emotional distress. It takes him a minute to get his eyes open, but when he manages it he sees that he's in a small, horrible smelling laundry room, naked and crusted in his own vomit. Justine is also there, looking disheveled and unsettling, and as soon as she notices Harry noticing her, she starts making some fairly unkind accusations about what he's thinking - and scratches his face about it. Harry asks what the vampires did to her, which, I think, says something about him. He's injured, he's poisoned, he just went through an immensely harrowing experience, this young woman he doesn't know well, and with whom he's had what I would charitably describe as mixed experiences up to this point is accusing him of ableism and misogyny and physically assaulting him, and his first response is "Oh no, what happened to you?". (Obviously, in the broader sense, Harry is not like, wholly innocent of either, but he wasn't doing them here). She shows him the vampire bites on her wrists and thigh, and explains that while she was fed upon, that's not the reason she's unstable. This is her baseline, some kind of poorly defined hormonal condition that prevents her from having the emotional control other people do. Medication didn't help, but Thomas feeding on her emotions does, which is part of why she's with him. We'll come back to this when we get to White Night, and probably again when we get to Battle Ground, but I always found Justine's assertion, in White Night, that her stability at that time was due to medication suspicious because she'd made it so clear in this book that meds don't work for her. On a first read I sorta figured were meant to attribute it to the (not insubstantial) advances in psychopharmacy between 2000 and 2007, but at the time of this writing it seems far more likely than otherwise that her newfound emotional control was in fact because it wasn't her, it was He Who Walks Beside, and I am vindicated. 

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Harry tries to force open the locked door, collapses, vomits again, and loses consciousness for a while. He wakes up with Justine trying to wipe his face with a dirty towel, and asks how long they've been there. Justine says the vampires had him for about two hours, and that it's been around another ten hours since then. He says they need to get out of there, and she says they can't, that this is the larder. Harry tries to explain that he's been poisoned, and needs to go to a hospital soon if he's going to survive, and Justine just kind of...shuts off. Dissociates. Almost immediately, the ghost of Paula, who is referred to in this chapter as Rachel, materializes. She isn't strong enough to speak so that Harry can hear her, but they manage to establish enough communication for her to explain that Bianca's fixation on her death is keeping her here, that she's tired, that she doesn't blame Harry for her death, although Harry apologizes anyway, for his role in it. (As an aside, she indicates "Bianca" with a "bottle-shaped curving gesture". Just, y'know, in case we didn't get that there was a gay thing happening between Paula and Bianca). She looks past him at something that scares her, or more likely that she wants Harry to know should scare him, and vanishes. It's Kravos, now wearing Justine's body, which is interesting, as far as how his ability to possess people works. She wasn't asleep, just kind of absent, which implies that sleeping people are similarly absent from their brains or their bodies or whatever Kravos needs access to. That tracks with what we already know, but it's an interesting way to confirm it. Harry challenges Kravos to try to possess him instead, to come in for a battle in the center of the mind. Kravos, who, while not nearly as smart as he thinks he is and inclined to really catastrophic overcomplication, was not actually born yesterday, refuses. He also tells Harry that several of the Red Court became ill after feeding on his blood. This implies that Reds have the necessary internal anatomy to die of amantin poisoning, which would be mildly intriguing on its own, but also it's Kravos's impression that Bianca was hoping would die as food for her children. He doesn't quote Bianca directly here, he's not trying to be helpful, but that Bianca may have meant for Harry to die earlier in the evening, and that she certainly left him in a room with half-turned Susan, knowing that Susan would try to feed on Harry and that this could very possibly kill both of them, seems to me to reinforce that starting a war with the White Council was a stretch goal at best, and more likely a legitimate accident. If she needed Harry or Susan alive for her plans to come to fruition, and knew this, she would not have left them together. 

Harry insults Kravos's intelligence, provoking him into pinning Harry against the door. He doesn't really do anything, although it's clear that he could, just makes some threats about making Harry's last moments a nightmare that seems to last years, and then leaves Justine's body. She kinda collapses into Harry, who isn't currently in any condition to be collapsed into, and they both end up on the floor, with Harry stroking her hair and trying to comfort her while she cries. She eventually relaxes, and Harry starts trying to make a plan, but he hears something in the laundry pile and of course he has to go investigate, although Justine tells him not to, that he won't like what he finds. She's right, of course - it's Susan, half turned and thirsty for blood. 

The post is a lot shorter than the chapter on this one, because a lot of this chapter is buildup, atmosphere, and emotionality, and there's not a lot for me to say about that other than that it's there and it works. It's sad and spooky and suspenseful - I feel for Harry and Justine, and I'm appropriately concerned about Susan's situation at the end. Also, these posts are considerably easier to write when I'm not directing most of my mental energy to other nonfiction writing. I'm not prepared to commit to a schedule or anything just yet, but the trend it gonna be in favor of More Posts. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 33

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Content warning: Harry is violently attacked and sexually assaulted at the end of this chapter. The discussion of this in the book is vivid and disturbing, if not "explicit" in the conventional sense. The discussion of it in this blog post is frank and explicit.

Harry actually had a plan this time. On his cue, Thomas and Michael scatter boxes of aluminum nails at the feet of Lea's horse, causing her, the hounds, and, intriguingly, the horse, the recoil. However much we may be told that the fae don't think like people, their relationship with the evidence of their senses doesn't seem to be much different from ours, so for Lea to flinch when nails are thrown at her feet makes sense. The hounds were of course once human, and it's hard to know how they think, but like, sure. But the horse? Why does that horse know what a nail is well enough to know they're usually iron and shy away from them? Was the horse also once a person? Are fae horses just inherently people? It's not unprecedented for fae steeds to be former humans, and it borders on common for them to be preternaturally intelligent, but this does not strike me as a context where "intelligent" should mean "can be misled by tricks that play on essentially human expectations". Lea covers her fear with indignation, asking how Harry dares to bring iron here and wield it against here. Harry explains that he only needed a just needed to eat something, and starts talking about how he just had to eat something, but now he's ready to go with Lea, and can he choose what he looks like as a dog, can he have white fur and blue eyes? This, I'm almost certain, is a Tam Lin reference. "For I will ride a milk white steed / the nearest to the town / because I was an earthy knight / they gave me that renown". (This does not appear in every recorded version of the ballad, and this exact wording is my best recollection of how it was said in Seanan McGuire's An Artificial Knight). Lea's "night black steed" helps set this up - this phrase is less frequent, but appears in the Tricky Pixie version, which is probably the best known in urban fantasy circles, and is certainly the one I would reach for if I wanted my wording to evoke Tam Lin in an urban fantasy novel. This is a very clever piece of foreshadowing. In this very book, Harry takes Janet's role, venturing into the dark and the unknown to rescue a transformed lover, at great risk including from that lover (because of the transformation) and largely through simple unwillingness to let her go. Of course, in the longer course of the series, Harry is our Tam Lin - literally a mortal man, who, in the aftermath of a bad fall is taken up as a knight by a faerie queen. It is perhaps worth noting here as well that in some versions of the ballad, Tam Lin's only relative, at least the only one named or referred to, is his grandfather. 

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Lea stops Harry's tongue with magic, but she's figured out that something is up, and assumes Michael and Thomas are going to do something, but Michael swears on the blood of Christ that they're not, and she seems to take that seriously. She uses the lariat to pull Harry close to her, and recognizes the smell of the mushroom. He says it's Amanita virosa, but since he presumably got it in Illinois, not Europe, it is more likely A. bisporigera, the eastern destroying angel amanita (A. virosa and A. bisporigera, along with A. ocreata and A. verna, are all routinely referred to as "destroying angel" and produce similar fatal poisonings). The symptom progression he describes is accurate for all of the destroying angels, though. Including the part about his innards falling apart - there are anecdotal reports of being able to pour the victim's liver out of their body on autopsy with these kinds of mushroom poisonings. He's also correct that there's no specific antidote, although I can't verify the effectiveness of fairy magic in the treatment of multiple organ failure. Lea, can, though, and after she's satisfied herself that he's not bluffing, and she seems to share his assessment that her magic can't fix it. She says he's gone mad, which, y'know, this plan was definitely formed by a man who's had four concussions in the past several days and hasn't gotten much sleep. Michael volunteers that he has what he refers to as St. Mary's thistle (Sylibum marianum, better known as milk thistle) which is frequently used in Europe for mushroom poisonings of this type. Lea, whom I can only assume has already started to experience the first corrupting effects of the dagger, demands that Michael give her the extract, forgetting, until Harry reminds her, that she probably doesn't want to be in open-ended debt to a Knight of the Cross. If she wants Harry to live, she's gonna have to make a deal. Michael offers that he'll give her the extract (technically, he'll give it to Harry, but on her behalf) if she lets Harry go and agrees to leave him alone for a year and a day. Lea asks why he'd do this, why he'd die rather than be hers, and he says people need him, and while he can't help them if he's dead, he also can't help them if he's with her. She says, again, that he's mad, and that he must get it from his mother, that she had a similar mindset "near the end". This lends context and credibility to what Chauncy said in Fool Moon about Maggie having been involved with dark forces, although it's not a whole lot of new information. 

Lea agrees, and Harry takes the milk thistle. He talks about needing to go to the hospital as well, but honestly the only things a hospital can do are provide intravenous silibinin (the active constituent in milk thistle) and keep an eye on whether he needs a new liver. Also like, intravenous fluids and other supportive care, but that's not really gonna make the difference in whether you die or not. You should, to be clear, you should go to a hospital if you ate, or think you might have eaten, a destroying angel mushroom, but Harry took milk thistle extract within minutes of eating it (you will not be able to do this because you did not make a whole plan to eat and then survive this mushroom) and premedicated with pepto-bismol, so the usefulness of a hospital is like, relatively lower in his case. He may also, in the long run, be able to recover more thoroughly from damage to his liver and other internal organs, but he won't enjoy the process. Thomas expresses surprise that Harry really did eat the mushroom, he'd assumed it was a bluff, because Harry's idea was, objectively, bonkers.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, Harry forgot something when putting together a deal with one of the Sidhe. Lea agreed not to pursue him, but she didn't agree not to send anyone else after him, and many things in faerie are under her command or owe her favors she can call in. So now they've got everything but Lea coming down on their heads. Now, I'm not actually entirely sure this holds up - she agreed to let him go, and not to pursue him as long as he remained in the moral world, and this doesn't really feel consistent with "letting him go", but given that, again, she has presumably already been affected by the dagger, her agreements may not bind as tightly. It's about two miles to their exit, and Michael can't make that with broken ribs, it's just not happening. Thomas proposes they leave Michael behind, but Harry insists on leaving them both behind, to hold the bridge, while he runs for it on his own. There's merit to this plan, inasmuch as it maximizes the chances someone will get to Bianca's mansion, and Harry's the only one of them who can open a door back out of the Nevernever. On the other hand, while Harry's right that this is a stealth-dependent plan and extra people hit diminishing returns pretty fast, going in alone is never the best idea. The difference between having someone else with you and not is always significant. Michael also doesn't especially want Harry to be alone with Thomas, which is fair, since as far as he knows Thomas's only motive here is that he needs their help to get Justine back. 

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So Harry runs, and the pretty fairy-tale woodland quickly turns to dark, spooky forest. (Possible Red Riding Hood callback, given what's coming). Bob finds the spot, in the trunk of a hollow tree. Harry starts gathering his will, which still hurts on account of getting his magic eaten, and is further complicated by physical exhaustion and either the beginnings of amantin poisoning or anxiety about having eaten an extremely poisonous mushroom. The first symptom of amantin poisoning is "unease", so either is legitimately possible here. Bob tries to get his attention a couple of times while he's opening the portal, but he blows him off so he can focus. This, unsurprisingly, turns out to have been a mistake. The veil was weak here, because it's been opened in this spot recently - Bianca had people watching this entrance as well, and when Harry comes through, the Red Court have him surrounded. Yeah this is, this is it guys. The monsters get him. I hadn't actually remembered until I went through this chapter to take notes that in addition to the fairly transparent analog to sexual assault in all that touching and licking and helplessness, Bianca herself does also very literally rape him here. Like, that happened. He's physically attacked, restrained, forcibly stripped, drugged, and raped. A couple of things come out of this. First of all, no more little bits of homoeroticism after this. Harry remains, as he puts it in White Knight, secure in his heterosexuality, but he stops, y'know, having thoughts about how warm and calloused  Michael's hands are. Harry's got the normal amount of internalized homophobia for a man of his era and cultural background, but he was maybe getting close to being able to start exploring some things and that just...stops, never to be picked up again. This is also, obviously, just an immense trauma, and a major factor in his headspace during the very end of this book and the entirety of the next one, as well as the time between. Everyone thinks his fairly obvious breakdown is because of Susan turning into half-vampire and then leaving, and obviously that didn't help (neither did the repeated assassination attempts at the very beginning of the war), but I think this may be the bigger factor. Also harder to process. Men aren't given frameworks for understanding that they've been raped, let alone how to think about it, how to start healing from it. I don't think he ever tells anyone, except Ivy, sort of indirectly in Small Favor. A lot of the obsession with finding a way to turn Susan fully human again may honestly be as much about wanting to reverse what happened to him, just turn the clock back on the whole thing. In Small Favor he observes in narration that he "never really got over" this, specifically in connection with being tempted by Mab's offer, and I think there's a more general theme there. As I said when we talked about Chapter 26, Harry is much less afraid of his own power, his own capacity for destruction, after this, but he's also a lot more tempted by the offer of more power. This is going on our list of things to keep an eye on - seeing how the sexual trauma here plays out across the rest of the series, especially in terms of Harry's relationship to violence, sexuality, and his own power. 

That's what I got for now. The freelance project that's been eating my life since the spring is for realsies over, and I genuinely have reason to hope that posts will be more frequent, perhaps even more consistent, going forward. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!