Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 39

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This chapter is a kind of montage epilogue tying up the loose ends from this book and setting some of the
major threads for the next one. 

The burn unit at the hospital is full, presumably due to Harry setting Bianca's party on fire. This is basically good news since it means a lot of the human attendees survived, but they stuck Harry in the maternity ward, with Charity, and she's recovered enough to be mean to him the entire time they're in there together, which he mostly weathers with the equanimity of someone who probably has a decent morphine drip. The baby pulled through and is getting stronger, which Harry suspects is due to Kravos having eaten some of his essence and Harry getting it back when he killed and ate Kravos, and Michael thinks is due to God simply declaring that morning to be a day of good things. It strikes me as likely that there is at least some truth to both positions. They're naming the baby after Harry, which is incredibly sweet even if it does also mean the poor kid is gonna be stuck with the name Harry Carpenter. It's no wonder they end up calling him Hank. Forthill and Michael take turns keeping an eye on Harry until he's released from the hospital, to keep him safe from vampire attacks, and when Harry tells Michael that he's worried about the repercussions of using destructive magic, Michael suggests, albeit in somewhat oblique language, that in this case Harry was the mechanism of the universe's retribution, and is therefor unlikely to be its subject. 

Harry, in a wheelchair, and Murphy, newly awakened from Harry's sleep spell, go to Kravos's funeral. They're the only ones who do, since absolutely nobody liked him. Murphy feels bad that she wasn't able to fight back against Kravos, she feels vulnerable and helpless, which is setting up her PTSD and personality changes in the next book, as well as her much greater willingness to trust and depend upon Harry between here and Cold Days. They have a little bit of a Moment in which they squeeze each other's hands. On the way out of the cemetery, Murphy sees Harry's headstone, and he assures her that he hasn't died doing the right thing. Yet. This is a good moment, but it's a bit odd that Kravos was buried in what we were told earlier in this book is a pretty expensive and exclusive cemetery. If we're ever told who went to the trouble of arranging it, I don't remember. 

Lydia, whose real name was apparently Barbara, goes into some kind of supernatural witness protection arranged by the church, but sends Harry a note apologizing and thanking him for his help. Thomas also sends Harry a thank you note, attached to Justine wearing nothing but a ribbon, clearly intended to be a gift to Harry. I'm sure that within the White Court this would be a perfectly reasonable gesture of appreciation and friendship, but I'm not sure it's consistent with Thomas's later characterization that he'd be sufficiently out of touch with human social norms to think this made sense for a human wizard. In any case, Harry sends Justine back, although he keeps the card (if I remember correctly, it's indicated in a later book that he also kept the ribbon, which gives me Questions about what Justine went home in). The ick factor of being given a whole other human being as a gift doesn't come up in the text, but Justine's emotional instability does, although Harry is careful to emphasize that it's not really her fault. He doesn't see needing a supernaturally attractive sex vampire to maintain your emotional equilibrium as fundamentally different from needing to take a mood stabilizer, and both are valid. 

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Susan called every day when Harry was in the hospital, but she's essentially dropped off the face of the earth since he got out. She moved out of her apartment and he can't get ahold of her at work. Eventually he uses magic to track her down while she's sunbathing at the beach, enjoying one of the last warm days of autumn. (This and the implied chronological distance to Harry's birthday later in this chapter suggests that it is not the tail end of October and the sunset times in Chapter 23 really don't make any sense). She tells him that the sunlight helps with the vampire impulses, but she has to lock herself in at night. Thomas and Justine gave her the basic rundown on her condition, another thing I would honestly have loved to read about. Harry says he'll find a cure, and then proposes, although he feels bad about the engagement ring being small. Susan kisses him, giving him a small dose of venom in the process (driving home how much she's changed, how much they both change, as Harry realizes he'd been craving it), and then says no. She tells him that she couldn't control herself, that the hungers are too intertwined. This is remarkably similar to the difficulty Thomas describes having with Justine in Turn Coat, which makes me wonder a little whether she would have come to the same conclusions if they hadn't been the ones to read her in on the half-vampire situation. And oh, the gender of it all. Taken in summary, Susan's arc follows this very tidy, stereotypical damsel in distress to badass action girl to fridged woman trajectory, but in the early books, where she's actually around, that really isn't who she is or what her relationship to Harry is, and I kind of wonder whether, if Jim Butcher had been a slightly more mature writer when he started the series, or taken the second and third books a little slower, we wouldn't have gotten something completely different for her, maybe something where she stays and remains both Harry's girlfriend and increasingly one of his allies against the forces of darkness, where she and Thomas have a lot to talk about, maybe get close before Harry and Thomas do, where maybe Murphy pulls away from Harry as a result of the traumatic events of this book rather than getting closer and becomes a recurring antagonist, or maybe she gets basically the same role she has in the books as written because Harry can, actually, have more than one important woman in his life at a time (we get there eventually in any case, but it takes a while because unresolved authorial sexism). That's probably a completely different series in some important ways, as changes like this usually have something of a domino effect. She leaves, telling Harry not to look for her, and that she'll call him 

Harry has nightmares now, about what Bianca and her vampires did to him. He basically stops leaving the house as he starts working on a cure or treatment for Susan. The juxtaposition of these things really reinforces what I said in Chapter 33 about Harry's efforts to fix Susan being about wanting to undo what happened to him. He's focusing on the theoretically achievable goal of reversing what Bianca did to Susan because it's theoretically achievable, whereas he can't just, make himself not have been sexually and physically assaulted. Bob tells him that the war is officially underway, and Paris and Berlin are in chaos, although it's not really clear what that means in practical terms. The White Council is coming to Chicago for a meeting about it, during which Harry will be called to account for his role in the outbreak of hostilities - this is, in fact, how Summer Knight starts, and it's good efficiency to just tell us that here, rather than having to either fill the reader in by narration or do a whole scene to give Harry the news at the beginning of Summer Knight. Murphy and Michael either know or guess that Harry's having a bad time, and come by with a care package, including the things he needs to help heat his apartment through the winter. And a razor, which Harry describes in narration as "pointed", giving us an idea that he's not taking care of himself very well. But they ask how he's doing and he invites them in - Harry reflects that friends make it easier. 

The minor practitioners of Chicago, and presumably everywhere else, have stopped going outside at night. Harry stops ordering pizza after someone delivers a bomb instead. Susan does not, in fact, call, but sent a card on Harry's birthday, which only said "I love you". 

So that's it for Grave Peril. Depending on how fast I work, the next post will either be the wrap up for this book, in which we discuss mythology, misogyny, and my ever-growing list of things to keep an eye on, or the Likes and Reservations post for Season 3 of Wheel of Time. I don't think I'm doing a midseason post for this one, we'll take the whole thing on balance when it's done. In either case, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!