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!