Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 2

Photo by Parker Coffman on Unsplash

Harry drops Billy off at the apartment he shares with Georgia, who looks more mature and confident than
she did when Harry first met her. She tells Billy she'll get the first aid kit for the scratches on his face, and Harry flees before someone tries to get him to socialize. 

In the car, Harry takes a proper look at himself in the rear-view mirror, the first time he's done so in weeks, as he doesn't keep mirrors of any kind in his house. This is brought up, using almost exactly the same wording, all the way back in Storm Front, but isn't mentioned in Fool Moon and is only referenced, not explained, in Grave Peril, when Harry brings up his lack of mirrors while expressing his confusion over how the Nightmare got to him. This recurring thing with the mirrors is, of course, mostly a justification for Harry not to have mirrors in the house, and therefore not always know what he looks like (and to avoid what I suspect would otherwise be a succession of rather tiresome scenes of him talking to himself - he seems like the type), but I have a fondness for characters being diligent about issues that never come up, like in October Daye when Toby checks to make sure she can read Walter's handwriting. It's not foreshadowing, his handwriting or her ability to read it are never plot points, it's just an offhand sentence establishing that Our Hero is thinking ahead and taking steps to prevent problems. I suspect this is a product of many UF writers coming up through tabletop roleplaying games. Games of the old school tradition often rely on this kind of thinking. Anyway, Harry is surprised to discover that he looks awful. He's unhealthily pale, with dark circles under his eyes, and his hair and beard have both grown out without any kind of maintenance, leaving them not only longer than he'd like but scraggly and uneven, especially his hair, part of which was burned off by the pizza bomb he received at the end of Grave Peril. He's been working constantly, down in the lab where there are no windows, no sunlight, and his circadian rhythm has become somewhat unmoored from things like the actual passage of day and night. 

The events of the end of the previous book, what happened to Susan, are summarized in detail. If you're reading this, you've been following me through Grave Peril for the past year and more, even if you weren't reading along in the actual book, so we don't need to go over this except to note that he says "The monster's got her." which we'll come back to in a moment. He's been looking for a treatment, some way to remove the infection of the Red Court. "There had to be a way. Had to be. There had to be." As he spirals into self-recrimination, this three times repetition is matched by a string of seven "should have"s. Very tidy, and even a kind of foreshadowing, given that threes and sevens are generally significant in fairy lore, and that this book specifically will be dealing substantially with the seven laws of magic and the triads of Queens for each fairy court. Come to think of it, there are seven fairy queens in this book, too because there are two Summer Ladies, and there are generally seven fae monarchs because of the Erlking. I don't know if this was at all intentional - it may be that the rhythm just sounded good, but the wonderful thing about literary analysis is that not everything we notice has to be intended by the author. Eventually Harry realizes that sitting pulled over on the side of the road and crying is not a very safe position to be in if the vampires decide to make another attempt on his life, and that he does actually need this potential job Billy set up for him if he wants to remain housed, and pulls himself together enough to head over to his office.

Photo by Stas Muravev on Unsplash

Harry's building is apparently in midtown. I need you to understand that there are 178 neighborhoods in  Chicago, belonging to 77 different "community areas" which in turn each belong to one of eight regions, and not a one of any of those things is called "midtown". I also want to be clear that I did not like, set out to fact-check this, I was just trying to get a sense of the general look of the neighborhood so I could find a photo to go with this paragraph. I would tentatively place Harry's office somewhere in New City, which is pretty well smack in the middle of Chicago, and which has historically had a substantial population of Irish immigrants, consistent with the presence of Mac's pub across the street. An actual picture of the area can be found here - note the stairs leading to an entrance below street level. There don't seem to be many buildings as tall as Harry's in this area, but I suppose you only need one. (Obligatory reminder, as well, that I am not personally familiar with Chicago geography). The security guard glares at him, on account of how worn out and scraggly he looks, and Harry suspected that if he hadn't recognized Harry he wouldn't have let him in. One hopes that there's some kind of process by which someone who rents space in this building could, if necessary, demonstrate that they belong there. The scorpion incident from all the way back in Storm Front is also given detailed summary here, as it was not in Fool Moon or Grave Peril, although it is mentioned in the latter. Harry says here that anyone could have thrown the elevator to the top of the shaft and then dropped it all the way to the bottom, leading into an extended bit about all the other occupants of the building who probably didn't do it, which gives us a decent list of who actually works there.

• First floor: Security desk, unclear if there are offices. 
• Second floor: ???
• Third floor: ???
• Fourth floor: orthodontist
• Fifth floor: Harry
• Sixth floor: psychiatrist
• Seventh floor: insurance office
• Eighth floor: ???
• Ninth floor: accountant
• Top (tenth?) floor: law firm

We are told here that the scorpion incident raised everyone's rent, which is mildly interesting inasmuch as it may mean the Red Court have bought the building at this point. Changes establishes the purchase to have been made "eight years ago" and I'm not entirely sure how much time passes between this book and that one. Currently we are two and a half years out from start of series, but I can never remember what time of year Death Masks, Blood Rights, or White Night are set, which makes the total passage of time a little difficult to figure from here. But we do know from Changes that the vampires raised the rent. It's also established there that the building is twelve stories, implying the existence of a tenth and eleventh floor between the accountant and the lawyers, although there are inconsistencies between the description of the building there and the one here that we'll get to when we get to Changes. 

Photo by Lennert Naessens on Unsplash

The doorknob of his office zaps him, which is odd since this is the first of our summer books and the weather isn't exactly conducive to static buildup, even inside an air conditioned building. So Harry gets out his shield bracelet before going in. The office is a mess. Papers are scattered on basically every flat surface, he left the coffee machine on until it burned, at some point, so I sincerely hope it wasn't an antique of the sort I proposed at the beginning of Grave Peril, and his flyers are in disarray. Also, I know we didn't talk about it when they're described in the previous book, and the detail isn't repeated here, but Harry apparently makes the flyers himself, and I would very much like to know how. If I needed to make flyers (notably something you tend to want more than one copy of) in the late '90s or early 2000's, I would have made something in Microsoft word, printed out a single copy on a home inkjet printer, and then either given it to someone with access to a copier at work or taken it to Kinko's for photocopying, photocopies on a laser printer being considerably less expensive than inkjet printing at any real scale. Harry obviously can't do like, any of that. He could work up the originals on a typewriter, I suppose, although I don't think there's any reference to his having one, but typing up multiples of the same flyer sounds dead boring and likely to lead to mistakes and inconsistencies. I don't think he can physically enter a copy shop without breaking something, even if he was exaggerating a little about being able to "kill a copier at 50 paces". Did he work up the originals on a typewriter and then get someone to take them to Kinko's for him? If so, who? Did he take the originals to a library, which you can often enter without getting too close to the printers, and ask for help making copies? Did he make the flyers on a letterpress machine? If so, where does he access one of those? I know this is like, the least significant mystery in the entire series, but it is a mystery nonetheless. 

In the midst of all this untidiness stands Mab, Queen of Air and Darkness, although of course Harry doesn't know that yet. She's got white hair, the whiteness of which is emphasized enough to make me wonder if Harry, or perhaps Jim Butcher, forgot that regular humans can have white hair. Usually that's older humans, but lots of perfectly ordinary things can make someone's hair lose color prematurely. Her skin somehow manages to look pale next to the hair, and her lips are the color of frozen mulberries, which I must admit does not summon up any particularly clear mental image for me. She's wearing a charcoal gray suit with enough of a slit up the side to make someone notice, although since I don't wear skirt suits, I don't know whether this is likely to be primarily for sexiness purposes or if it's more of a mobility thing. Her jewelry is all opals, and her nails have "somehow" (I suspect nail polish?) been lacquered to match. Her eyes are described as "oblique", but I don't know if that means like, she looks obscure and difficult to figure out, that she has epicanthic folds, or if her eyes are more literally at some kinda angle on account of how she isn't human. She's also described as having "the kind of beauty that makes men murder friends and start wars", so we're not starting out well on the misogyny front. To be clear, I would be less upset with almost any verb that isn't "makes". "The kind of beauty that inspires men to murder friends and start wars" would be acceptable, and so would "The kind of beauty for which men murder friends and start wars." It's reasonable to acknowledge that a lot of men murder friends and start wars because of beautiful women, but let's not deny their agency in this process or suggest that women, or their looks, are somehow directly responsible for men's actions. 

Photo via Smithsonian Open Access

Everything about her appearance suggests to Harry that she has money, and that if he can get her to hire
him, she might pay him money which he can use to pay bills and eat food. He worries briefly that it's somehow unwizardlike to be concerned about money. Obviously this is something of an ongoing neurosis on Harry's part - Nicodemus calls him out on it at least in Small Favor and I think in Death Masks as well - but he wasn't quite as broke in Storm Front as he is now, and he was a lot more comfortable openly considering that he needed money in that book than he is here. He's also late, although only by a couple minutes, and he looks like shit, neither of which is likely to impress "Ms. Sommerset". Indeed, she pretty much opens by telling him that she doesn't like to be kept waiting, and confirming that the condition of his office and personal grooming do not exactly have the feel of professionalism. He offers her a cup of coffee, which she declines, citing unwillingness to take the risk of something unsanitary. He asks if she's the "kind who takes chances", which is sort of an odd thing to say under the circumstances. She says she likes to hedge her bets (true of Mab's behavior generally, I think, although not always where Harry is concerned), and that she's deciding whether to gamble on Harry. He doesn't look like a good bet so far. She goes on to call him out pretty comprehensively, for being desperate, preoccupied, and apparently unable to manage his daily life, which does not bode well for his ability to do what she wants him for. He asks her to at least tell him what she needs, and she responds by asking him to soulgaze her. This serves to remind the reader what a soulgaze is and how it works, which is odd because I don't think we actually get a soulgaze in this book, but I also don't know what Mab was hoping this would accomplish. She has no soul to gaze upon, not the way a human does, she's got as much leverage as she needs over Harry here and so doesn't stand to gain much from, idk, mesmerizing him, and I don't think Harry's noticing that meeting her eyes doesn't initiate a soulgaze would be sufficient to establish his qualifications here, which seems to be her primary objective. 

In any event, Harry refuses, and she gets up to leave again, but Harry says he thinks she's underestimated his abilities, points out that she seems too good to be true, and points a gun at her. He tells her to put her hands on the desk, and Mab doesn't drop the Ms. Sommerset act, playing 'frightened but imperious' for all it's worth by swallowing delicately and widening her eyes as she demands to know what he thinks he's doing. I think it's possible that the reader is meant to wonder if Harry has actually misread this and is holding a gun on an innocent rich lady here, but mostly it's just that this is how Mab has chosen to test Harry's perceptive abilities, and she's not going to give him anything more to work with than she already has. He pulls a box of nails out of his desk (I honestly have no guesses about whether he keeps steel nails in his desk specifically so he can fae-test prospective clients or if they were ready to hand for some more mundane purpose), and rolls it at her, until at the last second she not only pulls her hand away but takes several steps back. Some of that may be the sidhe's normal aversion to cold iron, but I do wonder if her outfit mightn't be illusory, if she wasn't concerned that it would land on her shoe or something and reveal that she's not wearing real clothes. Harry says out loud that she's a faerie, and she visibly drops the act. He also reminds her that there are months left on his bargain with Lea. Mab smiles; he passed her test, and may be what she's looking for after all, although she wants to know how he figured it out. He cites the static on the doorknob, which is another idea borrowed from spiritualism, that she danced around his questions rather than answering them, which upon review I don't really think she did - he didn't ask many questions, and her answers to the ones he did were all within human parameters - but I suppose it's important to establish that the fae generally do this, that the door was unlocked when it shouldn't have been, and that she's not carrying a purse. She says again that he'll do nicely, and he starts to get a bad feeling, telling her that if she leaves now they can both forget this ever happened. She's not having it though - he passed her little test, so now he's gonna do what she came here to hire him for. There's a little bit of back and forth on this point, during which she tells him what she wants him to do: recover something that's been stolen, catch the thief, return it to its rightful owners, and vindicate her in the process. Harry refuses, unwilling to make another deal with a faerie, especially when he doesn't even know who she is. She tells him the bargain has already been made, and explains that she purchased his debt from Lea. 

Photo by jacqueline macou on Pixabay

Harry insists that Lea wouldn't do that, which honestly strike me as a pretty reasonable read. She's got a
responsibility to Harry that would be a lot easier to fulfill if he could be turned into a hellhound until whatever apocalyptic event he's destined to avert was on the immediate horizon, and even if she can't do that his debt to her makes it easier to stay involved and keep an eye on him. Even if he doesn't understand her motivations, he's correct in thinking that her interest in him is sufficiently personal that she wouldn't ordinarily give it up. If we'd had more time with Lea before this, it would actually have been a pretty decent clue that there's something up with her, which might prompt the astute reader to go looking for information about what it was. Unfortunately, we've seen very little of her, she was acting kind of weird for most of it, and Harry was deeply incurious about her motivations, which was understandable (drugged, concussed, exhausted, traumatized) but means that if this is meant to tip us off that something's up, it's not really successful. Then he pulls out a letter opener, presumably intending to use it to defend himself, and Mab makes him stab himself in the hand with it. Just like, the webbing between the thumb and forefinger, nothing load bearing, but still, ow. I'm... not sure Lea could have done that. I feel like if she could exert that kind of direct bodily control, she would have done so in the previous book, so either more has changed about the deal than just Mab buying the debt, or this is just an indication of Mab's much greater power. Harry asks who she is, and she tells him. 

Sorry this one took a little longer than planned. Mostly just a consequence of the 27 minute chapter. Chapter 3 is only 14 minutes, so you shouldn't be waiting quite as long. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 1

Photo by Luban Tvaroh on Unsplash

Harry meets Billy at Lake Meadow Park to investigate a rain of toads. It's very hot, and Harry's not in a great mood even before one of said toads lands directly on his head. Harry tells Billy to collect some of them, because he needs to check if they're real - if they're not, it's probably just a fairy playing a prank, but if they are, that means reality itself is somehow out of whack, which could be very serious indeed. This handily serves to remind us that fairies are a thing in this setting, which is important since they haven't been mentioned since Harry summoned Toot Toot in the middle of Storm Front, and they're gonna be kind of a big deal this book. Billy has questions about the 'The toads might not be real' thing, but Harry shuts him down hard, saying that he hasn't slept or eaten a hot meal any time recently and he's not in the mood to teach. There's also an old lady with a shopping cart, but we'll get to that in a minute. 

Billy invites Harry to come play Arcanos with him and the other Alphas. Based on his description, I'm guessing this is along the same basic lines as Pathfinder, but as far as I can tell, Arcanos itself is not a real game. He describes how they're working against a Council of some kind in the current campaign, and how there's spells and demons and dragons, which Harry almost reasonably says sounds too much like work. Billy doesn't seem terribly surprised, and uses this as an entry point to express that he's concerned about how much time Harry's spending lurking in the basement, even allowing as it's valid to be stressed about the vampire war and the white council coming to town. Harry denies knowledge of either the war or the Council, and I can't figure out if we're still doing the "The White Council has a whole thing about secrecy" thing or if Harry's just cranky and doesn't think Billy, specifically, whom he perceives as basically a regular civilian, werewolfism notwithstanding,  should know about it. Harry also insists he's gone out and socialized plenty of times, like when he went to a football game with the Alphas. Unfortunately that was six months ago, so this kinda undercuts his argument. Billy lays out, over the course of some back and forth, that Harry doesn't answer the phone or the door anymore, isn't at his office, and apparently hasn't shaved, showered, gotten a haircut, or done laundry in longer than is generally considered socially acceptable. Come to think of it, how does Harry do laundry? Billy says "gone out to do laundry", and if we take that as accurate, he's not handwashing clothes in his sink or using a copper boiler on his hearth and then line drying them in the back yard, which would have been my first thought, but I don't think he can go to a laundromat without risking messing up the machines - even if the washers and dryers, which have relatively few electronic parts, would cooperate, there are other things in there that he'd probably break, and he tends to try to avoid that kind of thing. 

Billy also swung by Harry's office, and informs him that he's a week out from getting evicted if he doesn't pay the rent on it, and that he took the (admittedly fairly extreme) liberty of scheduling Harry a 3pm appointment that day with one Ms. Sommerset. Harry's a normal amount of upset that Billy like, went through his mail, checked his answering machine, and returned phone calls on his behalf, and insists that he's fine, that the last thing he needs is to worry about other people getting hurt for associating with him, and that he doesn't need help. 

Photo by Alfred Kenneally on Unsplash

So the old lady with the shopping cart. As they're having this back and forth, and dropping a few other pieces of information, like that the Reds - wait, they keep calling them the "reds", and most of the conflict between them and the White Council is repeatedly described as a "cold war", we should revisit that - are moving more "muscle" into town, we're periodically reminded of this old lady with a shopping cart who's the only other person at the park just now. It's worth reviewing the passage yourself to see how it's interspersed, but we're updated on this old lady and her cart three times before someone tries to kill Harry. A pair of black-clad humans in the bed of a pickup truck open fire on him with what are described as  automatics "in the mini-Uzi tradition", which is a really excellent way to give the reader a good idea of what they should be picturing and what the threat level is without locking yourself into a set of technical specifications which will distract and irritate the gun nerds if you accidentally violate them. Harry gets his shield up, and deflects all the bullets, although it stresses his bracelet, and he's concerned that something might ricochet and hit a bystander. After a few seconds, his attackers have to reload, and he takes the opportunity to use his force ring (we get a reminder of how it works) to strike back at them, although he does it at an angle, because catching them full on could kill them, which would violate the first Law of Magic (of which we are also reminded). One of the gunmen is disarmed and thrown from the truck, the other isn't, but loses the sunglasses and ski mask that are hiding his face, revealing him to be in his mid-teens at the oldest. He takes the magical assault remarkably in stride (indicating that either he's fought wizards before or he's high, although neither possibility is raised explicitly), finishes reloading, and starts shooting at Harry again. At which point, of course, the old lady with the shopping cart reveals herself to be no such thing and produces a sawed off shotgun. With her on one side and the gunman on the other, Harry's shield bracelet can't protect him from both, and he figures he's pretty much dead, and likely Billy along with him, indicating, I note here, that he remembered Billy was there but apparently completely forgot that he has powers of his own. Billy did not forget that he has powers - he strips out of his sweatpants and t-shirt, shifts, and bites the shotgun lady's hand, causing her to drop the gun. Unfortunately, she's a ghoul, so she promptly sprouts claws and teeth of her own, and slashes Billy's face. He backs off a little and circles, timing it so her back is to Harry at the same time the gunman runs empty again. Harry seizes the moment, picks up the shotgun, and tells Billy to move, which prompts the ghoul to turn around, allowing Harry to fire the shotgun into her stomach. Not a fatal injury for a ghoul, but enough to get her to flee to the pickup truck, from whence all of their attackers flee. 

Billy observes that he didn't see the claws coming, which is a sharp and deliberate contrast to Harry's "I don't need help, I won't tell you what's going on" routine. Billy is used to working with a group, and not used to putting up any kind of front. The first thing he did, actually, after this fight (well, and after putting his clothes back on), was ask what the shotgun lady was, and the second thing was to do this error analysis, out loud, without making any kind of big deal about it. What went wrong in this fight? He didn't see the claws coming. This is a reminder to everyone he's working with, even though in this case that's just Harry, to be mindful of the claws the next time they fight a ghoul, and not to assume everything they're fighting that looks human is. It also indicates that this was not a problem of judgement, timing, coordination, or anything else that might need further work or discussion between now and the next patrol. Notably, there's no "I should have seen that", "I'm so stupid", anything like that. Billy doesn't see any shame, or anything to apologize for, in being caught off-guard by an unfamiliar threat, he's just noting it out loud for his own and other's future reference. The Alphas probably make such observations to each other all the time, it's part of what makes them an effective team and Billy and effective leader, and it stands out next to Harry's refusal to even acknowledge that he needs friends. 

Photo by Richie Bettencourt on Unsplash

Harry also tells Billy that the ghoul was probably from the LaChaise clan, which I am never, ever going to spell correctly without looking it up. They work for the Red Court, and Harry has caused them some unspecified headaches in the past. I'd have to check, but I don't think any prior conflict with ghouls is in the short stories, so these headaches may remain a proper noodle incident, if not a terribly mysterious one. And that Billy can let the toads go, because the one Harry was just kind of holding during that entire fight pooped in his hand. Poor toad. That means something is seriously Up in the magical world, a conclusion which is graphically reinforced as they get back in the car, and the light rain of toads becomes an absolute (if highly localized) toad storm, accompanied by a nauseating disruption in the normal flow of magic. 

So there we are, Summer Knight is underway. The other post I'm working on is still in progress, and I haven't spontaneously summoned up the energy to talk about Wheel of Time in the last *checks notes* four days. I still can't usefully commit to any kind of posting schedule, but expect to see something from me within a week, unless something else Happens. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Grave Peril Retrospective

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

Easy things first, it's notable that unlike the first two books, Grave Peril doesn't contain any spectacularly
bad sentences, and does contain a couple of markedly good ones. We're probably going to talk a little bit more about prose and sentence structure as we move forward with this series, if only because as Jim Butcher becomes more consistent in his storytelling techniques, we're eventually going to run out of things to say about the way he does worldbuilding, foreshadowing, and character arcs that isn't "Oh, look, there it is again." 

I must issue a small correction here: when we talked about Chapter 27 of Storm Front, I said I didn't think we saw the montage ending format again, but it does make an appearance here as well. For that matter, I just looked at my post for the last chapter of Fool Moon, and apparently it happened there too, so either this is an early series thing that gets dropped at some point, or it's a consistent thing that I just utterly failed to retain. 

The plot here genuinely doesn't make sense. Let's ignore the wine at Bianca's party having vampire venom in it, assume that was just recreational and that Harry's notions of her not expecting him to come, or poisoning all the wine on extremely short notice were the result of his deeply impaired judgement. Let's assume that she had both the ability and opportunity to mind control Susan into getting a copy made of Harry's invitation. (This is not to say that Susan might not have done it without being mind controlled, but there's no way Bianca could reasonably have planned for that). She still couldn't reasonably have counted on Harry coming to the party, or on his bringing a plus one, especially with the Nightmare putting Murphy out of commission. She couldn't reasonably have planned on his not just claiming protection for Susan. More to the point, she couldn't reasonably have planned on Lea bringing her the sword, unless Lea was entirely in on this from the very beginning, which seems pretty unlikely given her behavior in this book and what she and Mab express about her priorities in later books. Without Amoracchius, she has no real leverage over Harry. Ortega was plainly aiming to start a war (although, why?), but Bianca's plan had like, at least three potential outcomes where Harry was concerned, only one of which involved the war. He could as easily have been killed, either at the party or by Susan in the laundry room, and might have agreed to become a vampire and stay with her and Susan, and it's not at all clear what outcome she was aiming at. If this were Nicodemus, I would assume that all outcomes were considered acceptable wins here, but Bianca doesn't strike me as that type.

I still don't feel like I understand the use of imagery associated with addiction narratives here. It's all over the place but it doesn't really go anywhere. No one in this book really goes through an addiction arc. No one in this series really goes through an addiction arc. Rachel was addicted to vampire venom, but that doesn't seem to affect her choices, or her role in the story, now that she's a ghost. Stallings is apparently addicted to nicotine, but I'm not sure that's ever even mentioned again, and it's certainly not handled by the story as an addiction thing. Justine's situation with Thomas actually isn't presented as an addiction. And while this could have been setting Harry up for long term issues around vampire venom, it mostly doesn't. Lydia might be a drug addict, and someone explicitly suggests as much, but the only time we know of her actually using drugs on purpose, it was to stay awake so she couldn't be possessed by the Nightmare. Come to think of it, after the Three Eye in the first book, addiction is mostly not an issue for anyone in this series, unless I'm forgetting something. Nick Christian is an alcoholic, and the Red King is a blood slave, but they're in one book each and I have difficulty with this notion of someone being addicted to something they literally and straightforwardly need to live. (I am familiar with the concept of food addiction. Not here to challenge how anyone understands their own lived experience, but the Red King is not a real person, has no lived experience, and does not display the behaviors typically associated with food addiction). I guess Mort is an alcoholic in this one, but that doesn't really go anywhere either. On that note, sort of.

List of things we're keeping an eye on, as of the end of Fool Moon:

• 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?

Additions to this list, accumulated throughout Grave Peril:

• What languages are used for spellcasting, and by whom. 
• Harry's relationship to violence, sexuality, and power, and how that's informed by the sexual trauma he experienced in the late chapters of Grave Peril. 
• Influences from Young Wizards, Wheel of Time, and Valdemar. 
• Is Harry going to give his life (in the sense of either "devote" or "sacrifice") to God?

Malone and Murphy both get got here. Nightmare Kravos possesses Lydia, but the ones he inflicts serious, lasting psychic harm on are the cops. So this throughline is definitely still being built upon, even if we don't yet have any indication what it's about, except that it's interacting with both the series more general difficulty with law enforcement and the inadequacy of systems. Lydia was left lying about loose when they took down Kravos. Kravos was put in regular prison and was able to orchestrate the whole Nightmare thing, because they weren't equipped to deal with him. The cops keep Harry out of the loop about Kravos's suicide because it's police business, where if they'd told him, if Murphy had told him, I think there's about a 70% chance Harry could have basically solved the plot and spent the rest of the book resting off that first concussion rather than accumulating four more. Murphy having been awake for two days was, y'know, probably a factor here, both in her not telling him about Kravos and her being in a position for him to get into her head like that. So just the sheer physical exhaustion often imposed on law enforcement is probably an ongoing factor here, although the former may also be a certain amount of turnabout as fair play, especially given that both Harry and Jim Butcher forgot that Harry didn't actually keep anything secret from Murphy in Fool Moon. We also see some complication to the inadequacy of systems things here, in the form of the Church's supernatural witness protection program. Lydia is the first character thus wrapped up (the Sellses having gone into regular witness protection), and as far as we know, everyone who ends up there is safe and looked after. Harry's vulnerability to things that make him hurt less is definitely on display here, with the vampire venom.

On the misogyny score, this book actually...does pretty well, especially compared to its predecessors? It's got a lot of women in it, which is always a good start. You can still be very misogynistic while having a lot of female characters, obviously, but it's much easier to make clear that a woman displaying a trait that could reasonably be understood as a misogynistic stereotype does not reflect the text's or author's view on women as a group when she's contrasted against lots of other women who don't display that trait. Charity, Lea, Mavra, and Justine are all introduced here, Lydia is load-bearing if not especially well handled, and Sonia, although she doesn't get a lot of depth or screen time, at least gets to be likeable and competent. The only substantial on-page misogyny here, at least that I can find in my notes, is towards Lydia, although that's... significant. Like Harry is really weird about this girl. In Chapters 4 and 15 both, he thinks her willingness to engage in survival sex is suspicious, possibly indicative of involvement with the Nightmare, rather than just, y'know, she's a young woman with few resources at her disposal other than her looks and other people's willingness to take advantage. To say nothing of the assumption that her being victimized by the Nightmare indicates some kind of cooperation with it. That's...not a good look. She's also pretty low on agency here, but that's where the Lots of Women helps. Charity also gets something of the damsel in distress treatment here, but she's instrumental in her own rescue from the Nightmare at the cemetery. Murphy is taken off the board pretty early in the book, but it's honestly hard not to see that as a compliment - if she'd been able to participate, the plot would have been solved too fast, so Butcher had to get her out of the way. We've already talked extensively about how good Susan is in this book, and how Butcher goes out of his way at several points to avoid falling into easy sexist tropes or conventional gender dynamics between her and Harry. Paula is arguably kind of fridged here, I mean, she very much did die to motivate her romantic partner, that was a pretty significant thing that happened. However like, she was fridged for the villain's motivation, she's a woman fridged for another woman's motivation, and she exercises agency and is in fact instrumental in the defeat of the very villain she died to motivate. So while I won't say that this deserves a pass or anything, it's still fridging, it is at least an unusual and somewhat subverted instance thereof. Certain amount of Bury Your Gays, though. Relatedly, Bianca's motives are not at all feminized - wanting revenge about a dead girlfriend is generally something that happens to male characters - although Mavra's are. Speaking of which, the uh, the exorsexism. On the offchance that you're not up on your queer oppression vocabulary, that's hate towards or discrimination against nonbinary, intersex, or altersex people, typically reflecting the belief that it is unnatural, immoral, or impossible for someone to be anything other than entirely and obviously male or entirely and obviously female. Mavra's being referred to as "it" might be a simple piece of species-appropriate dehumanizaton for someone who is both very evil and like, markedly dead, but her physical androgyny, especially as it stands in contrast to her very feminized desire to avenge her murdered children and grandchildren, makes this feel a lot more like the violent degendering of a woman with an ambiguous presentation, and that would be uncool even if it weren't explicitly validated in Harry's perspective, and combined with the repeated assertions that Mavra isn't a lady, isn't a woman, et cetera. They're just this side of harassing her out of a public restroom, honestly. And then we have that crack about the ken doll being anatomically correct, which I think we already talked about as much as we needed to in the chapter in which it occurred, but I'm noting here for posterity.

One of the awkward things about vampires is that you have to talk about their literary sources as much as their mythological sources if you want to be at all thorough, and the literary sources are all over the damn place. To the best of my knowledge, none of the vampire types in The Dresden Files are an exact match for any previous literary or mythological vampire or type of vampire, but nearly all their traits have some precedent. We're going to focus on the Red Court here, and get into the Black and White courts in Blood Rites when we actually learn more than the most cursory details about them. Before we proceed, I should note that we are going to be talking about a lot of creatures whose names either have no standard spelling in the Latin alphabet, have no standard spelling at all, or have multiple similar names across the languages of different peoples. I have generally defaulted to the spelling that appears in the title of any given creature or entity's wikipedia page, from whence you should be able to find at least some of the other names or spellings.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

If the narcotic venom has any direct mythological or folkloric antecedents, they are outside of both readily available vampire lore and my own (by no means comprehensive!) knowledge of mythology and folklore. This concept, as applied to vampires, seems to first appear in Carmilla (which I unfortunately have not yet read), and likely bears a relationship to both the incubus and to sleep paralysis demons like the alp and the mare, both of which are blood drinkers, given the transition from pleasure to suffocation that Laura experiences when Carmilla feeds upon her. Given the nature of the central relationship in Carmilla, I probably should have read it at some point while working on Grave Peril, but I didn't know about the lesbian vampire situation until I started writing this post. Being fed upon as an ecstatic, potentially addictive experience, was sufficiently thought of by 1991 to be codified in the first edition of Vampire the Masquerade, from whence it was transmitted to the urban fantasy of the era, even if Vampire's own literary precedents were not among any given author's influences. I don't know if Jim Butcher has read vampire, but I know he played Changeling, so I'd be very surprised if he hadn't. Storm Front itself is the earliest text with which I am personally familiar that specifically makes the source of ecstasy in being fed upon a venom. The only mythological association I can find between anything resembling vampires and bats or batlike creatures is the Piuchén, a blood drinking snake or lizard with bird or bat wings from Mapuche mythology, which may be able to shapeshift, into the form of humans, plants, or other animals, and in some versions has a mixed form with animal features. Many mythological vampires or other blood drinkers have some ability to shapeshift, but their inhuman form is not a bat or something batlike. In the 1870 novel (strictly speaking a series of short stories) Vikram and the Vampire by Sir Richard Burton, the "vampire" in question, a baital (aka a vetala and like, 6 other similar names because local variation in pronunciation plus Englishmen trying to spell foreign words) is described in the preface as "a huge Bat, Vampire, or Evil Spirit which inhabited and animated dead bodies", although the only batlike quality it appears to display in the text is hanging upside down by its toes (I haven't read this one in its entirety either, just skimmed it). Aside from being associated with dead bodies and often malevolant, the vetala as it appears in mythology does not seem to have any particularly vampiric qualities. Vampires, as such, turning into bats, as such, appears to originate with Dracula, and was certainly codified by it, and the association of vampires with bats appears to have come about sometimes between the 1500s and the 1800s, when white people became aware of blood drinking bats (first referred to as "vampire bats" in 1810) in the Americas. The bat form the Red Court vampires take is, however, seems to draw heavily from Camazotz, a Mayan bat spirit that spreads disease, and which probably serves the lords of the underworld. In the Popol Vuh, they're a type of thing, rather than a thing, and give the Hero Twins some trouble, but the Popol Vuh was strictly oral tradition for most of its existence, and our oldest written records of it are from the early 18th century and were created by Dominican (in the sense of being part of the Domincan Order, not of being from the Dominican Republic) priest Francisco Ximenez, giving us something of a Snorri Sturlson problem, although that's honestly a much less severe problem than we might have had under the circumstances. Per my partner, who actually has some background in this area, Ximenez is generally considered reliable. The flesh masks may reference the Caribbean soucouyant (also known as an asema, or simply a hag), who removes her skin before coming to drink your blood and is believed to be a syncreticization of french vampire folklore, the Yoruba Aje, and the Caribbean creatures (properly a category of creatures) called jumbees.

In mythology, most vampires are revanants - they were killed by a vampire, or were fed upon by a vampire and later died, or they met some other precondition for vampirism that caused them to become one after their death, although those upon whom a soucouyant feeds excessively may become one themselves without dying first. The half-turned junior vampires of the Red Court seem to be playing with both the psychic connection sometimes established between a vampire and its prey (I have not been able to confirm that this predates Carmilla), which is part of the "get fed upon by a vampire, die, rise as a vampire" deal, and with the dhampir, the child (traditionally the son) of a vampire and a human. In Albanian folklore, dhampir are mostly human, but can practice sorcery and see invisible vampires, may be unusually courageous, and traditionally kill their vampire parent (almost invariably their father). They eat regular food without issue, but may be able to extend their lives by drinking human blood. In I think mostly the 15 and 1600s, people claiming to be dhampir were sometimes hired to fight vampires other than their own parents, in order to rid a village of a vampire who was causing a plague or crop failure. In literature, the dhampir seems to have been popularized by Blade. 

While they do not have all the classic vampire weaknesses (notably they are unbothered by garlic and, as far as I know, by hawthorn), most the the Reds' vulnerabilities (sunlight, holy symbols and holy water) are associated with folkloric vampires, with two notable exceptions: their inability to enter homes without an invitation, and their ability to be incapacitated by opening the blood reservoir in their bellies. Whether the "can't enter without an invitation" thing is even in Dracula is sort of a matter of interpretation, and certainly it does not seem to have applied to vampires before this point, although it certainly applied to the fae and a few similar things. Notably, the Red Court vampires of Dresden Files are to some extent creatures of the Nevernever, and separated from the fae more by taxonomy than origin. If the blood reservoirs have any literary source, I have not been able to discover it - they do not appear in Vampire: The Masquerade or Vampire: The Requiem (the source material for the former in particular consisting largely of comics I haven't read) - and do not appear in most contemporary urban fantasy. Instead, this seems to draw from the kappa, creatures of japanese folklore who occasionally drink blood (although for the most part they would rather have a cucumber) and who can be weakened by tricking them into spilling the reservoir of water on their heads (conventionally by bowing deeply, prompting them to do the same), and the Capelobo, a blood and brain eating therianthrope from Brazilian mythology, which might resemble a dog, tapir, or anteater, and which according to at least one source can only be defeated by shooting it in the navel. In this case this seems to be the matter of getting such a precise shot on a dangerous creature with a great deal of obscuring hair, but this is the only vampiric creature I'm aware of for which "get it in the stomach" is a conventional means of defeat. 

Vampires living in societies with complex hierarchies and archaic titles seems to be a 20th century convention. Certainly it existed before 1991, but I cannot readily say from whence it came, although the aristocratic contexts of Dracula and Carmilla must have played a role in its development. Before embarking on this post, I had thought their extensive presence in Central and South America was codified by Vampire: The Masquerade, but if it was, it was not by any of the first three editions of the core rulebook (all other having been published after Grave Peril). So like, why South America? First of all, there's the vampire bats. All three of the world's extant blood drinking bat species live in South or Central America, so it's sort of reasonable to put vampire vampires there as well. Second, much of that area is a hot mess, politically and economically speaking, and if you're not familiar with how it got that way, "it's because of the vampires" probably seems like a reasonable, even antiracist proposition. The short answer is that this part of the world has repeatedly found itself on the expendable/exploitable end of US policies on everything from communism to paper manufacturing. The shorter version is that if you just blame Henry Kissinger, personally, for all of it, you'll be missing some nuance but close enough for government work, although Harry Anslinger probably deserves a dishonorable mention here as well. In a way, this plays with the Southern Gothic tradition, using supernatural creatures (not exclusively vampires) to talk about the various acts of colonialism, slavery, environmental exploitation, racism, and manoralism committed by white people in the Americas, and like, that's pretty accurate here. It is also worth noting that much of the US's fuckery with its southern neighbors was a lot harder to know about when Grave Peril was being written than it is today, as the documents surrounding US involvement with Operation Condor were not declassified until 1999, and there wasn't google yet. (The history of fuckery is long here, I don't know when other things might have been declassified, or how widely known they were prior to officially becoming knowable).Third, there are the persistent rumors, which I have largely encountered through talking to other humans in physical space, and which I have been utterly unable to source, that Hernan Cortes, Francisco Pizarro, or both, were vampires. Frankly this strikes me as at least as plausible as any other claim that a real historical person was a vampire. There may be a relationship between this and the pishtaco, a boogeyman who appears as a white man or mestizo and steals people's fat. He originates in what Wikipedia insists are rumors of conquistadors killing indigenous people to use their fat for medicines or to lubricate their guns. Personally I think they did do that. Like, it sounds reasonable. Fucking conquistadors. Anyway. Notably a pishtaco might be warded off by showing him a clove of garlic that has been pierced with a needle. 

Anyway. Like I said we're gonna talk more about the other Vampire courts when we get to Blood Rites, but the other thing Grave Peril really introduces are ghosts, and there's enough here to be worth talking about without getting into stuff from later books. 

Photo by Šimom Caban on Unsplash

If the spirits of the dead hanging out in the world of the living, or influencing our world from some kind of other side, is not a true cultural universal, it's pretty damn close. Of course, ghosts in the Dresden Files, while they seem to have some kind of consciousness, are not the real spirits of the people they resemble, but impressions left behind on the environment. This idea originates with the 19th century notion of place memory, which is what it sounds like, the idea that sounds, events, or emotions could be stored in the places they happened and later retrieved by individuals with the right gifts or skills. Early members of the Society for Psychical Research - an organization which still exists, and which has been involved (more properly, members of which have been involved) with both the perpetuation and the debunking of numerous fraudulent psychic phenomena - considered place memory a possible explanation for hauntings. The idea of "ectoplasm" also dates to this period, and originates in roughly the same community. Originally it was conceived of as a gauzy material draped over mediums by the spirits with which they communicated. I note with interest that this would bear some visual similarity to a caul, the membrane that a very few (roughly 1 in 18,000) babies are born with, which has been associated with supernatural abilities in some parts of Europe since at least the early modern period, and in Romania indicates that the child will become a strigoi (a type of vampire) when it dies. It seems to have been noted spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle who described it as a viscous, gelatinous substance, as is the case in Dresden Files. I cannot find a literary or folkloric origin for ghosts only being able to interact with things related to their death or the trauma that caused them to exist, but it follows quite naturally from the fact that ghosts in folklore and legend generally only do interact with people or things within some specified area of interest. In urban fantasy, which tends to want Rules, this pretty naturally translates into the idea that they only can interact with those things.

Okay, I think that's everything. I'm working on the post for Wheel of Time season 3, but it might be a while. Hopefully not a "don't put it up until like a week before the next season" while, but a while. There's uh, a lot to unpack about the final episode. We'll get started on Summer Knight sometime in the soonish, and I've got a couple of other posts in the works. I also had an Idea about this series, but I'll let you know more about that when it's past the "Could I actually do this?" stage. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!