Storm Front, chapters eight and nine, in which Will endures for you, precious reader

I was actually going to just drop this book and move onto something else (probably Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings), that is how much I hate Harry Dresden.  The moments when he's supposed to be roguishly charming or witty make me want to lock him on the other side of a door, and the moments when he's supposed to be foolish or abrasive or share Old-Fashioned views on women make me want to throw him off a bridge.  The nature of magic is really fun and interesting, actually, but it's so inadequately explained that it starts forming plot holes. (E.g.: Dresden meets with a vampire and takes a literal pocketful of sunshine with him as a security measure, but no explanation is given for why he can only carry one at a time, so why doesn't he go with cargo shorts crammed full of summer days?  Why does it only work once?  'Plot mandate' is not a good enough reason.)

But I figured I should at least finish reading the book so I could do a quick wrap-up post, and about halfway through (a few posts from now) I hit a line of narrative so strikingly wretched that the heavens rent asunder and a sidereal entity appeared before me to declare: No: the people must know your suffering in its every exacting detail.  Thus bidden by them who turn the wheels of the stars, I opened a new Chrome tab and began to blog.

(Content: misogyny, death, invasion of privacy, discussion of rape.  Fun content: Fred Clark, womanpires, and nitpicking alchemy.)

Storm Front

Chapter Eight: Boners (It's A Pun) (Get It?)*

Dresden stumbles home late from his investigation of the lake house (where he was accosted by White Council enforcer Morgan) and decides to unwind by brewing potions.  He's got a two-floor basement apartment, a giant cat named Mister, and no hobbies apart from magic.  He describes himself as "the arcane equivalent of a classic computer geek", doing magic and nothing else, but I struggle to see how that fits with the rest of what we know about him: that he's broke and most people don't take him very seriously.  If he's starving for work, he's not doing magic professionally, and if he's doing magic for himself, how is he affording it (we're about to see that it's pricey) and why doesn't he seem to have anything to show for it?  His apartment is candle-lit and wood-fired; no enchanted lamps or heated floor or an ensorcelled compass that detects when people lose their keys within a three-block radius.

Dresden occupies an interesting sort of place here, metatextually.  He's sort of like a level 1 character in an RPG, who is supposedly the hero/survivor of a hundred life-or-death struggles, but also has a single Potion of Lesser Cure Wounds in his inventory and is legitimately threatened by a random encounter with two Tiny Bats.  I have no idea where he fits into his world.  Do most wizards live like this?  If other wizards aren't broke, why?  Do wizards normally just run big corporations (meddling with stocks via thaumaturgy, obviously) and funnel their bonuses into building sweet arcane artifacts?  In basically every facet of his life, I can't tell if he's ordinary or exceptional by the book's standards.

Anyway.  Dresden heads down into his basement's basement, where he keeps his lab, and wakes up the air spirit named Bob that lives in a skull on his shelf.  Bob is Dresden's magical database, since he's got unnumbered years of experience assisting various wizards.  Unfortunately, Bob is also an even bigger skeeze than Dresden, requiring us all to recalibrate our skeezometers by an order of magnitude in order to take proper measurements:

"Let me out for a ride, and I'll tell you how to get out of it." 

That made me wary. "Bob, I let you out once. Remember?" 

He nodded dreamily, scraping bone on wood. "The sorority house. I remember." [....] 

"Save it. I don't want to hear it." 

He grunted. "You're trivializing what getting out for a bit means to me, Harry. You're insulting my masculinity."

Their debate on who's more masculine goes on until Dresden trumps Bob with his upcoming date with Susan ("Dark skin [...] dark hair, dark eyes. Legs to die for. Smart, sexy as hell."  Three repetitions of the word 'dark', one unspecified use of 'smart'.  Is there any louder way to scream 'I'm not racist or sexist because I threw in a single word about her that isn't about her body'?)  Dresden moves on to demanding they make an "escape potion" without actually specifying the type of escape (Bob later says it'll temporarily turn him into wind), but Bob refuses unless they also brew a love potion.  Harry makes various threats and refusals back, but ultimately realises Bob has the upper hand and relents.

And, I thought, if Susan should ask me for some kind of demonstration of magic (as she always did), I could always--No. That would be too much. That would be like admitting I couldn't get a woman to like me on my own, and it would be unfair, taking advantage of the woman.

He doesn't quite call it what it would actually be (hint: rape) but at least consent eventually came into his calculations somewhere.  After his own manly pride.  (I hate Dresden so much.)   So they brew the potions, which are interesting enough (Harry at one point pours a jar of mouse scampers into the escape potion, and a sigh into the love potion).  Other ingredients for the love potion include tequila ("Champagne, tequila, what's the difference, so long as it'll lower her inhibitions?"--I also hate Bob), chocolate ("Chicks are into chocolate, Harry"), perfume, lace, candlelight, a love letter (torn from a smutty novel: "women eat these things up"), and powdered diamond (Dresden substitutes a fifty-dollar bill after being assured "Money [...] very sexy").

Predictably, I have Questions.

We're told that the ingredients for any potion vary with the person making it, and Bob's ability to deduce the right ingredients from knowledge of a person is what makes him so valuable, so the above isn't just a love potion, it is a Harry Dresden Love Potion, for use only by Harry Dresden to make a woman fall in love with Harry Dresden.  So... why is it so generic?  Why is it full of stereotypical Chick Stuff instead of items that might actually relate to the kind of person who would love Harry?  Why isn't the liquid base black coffee with a ton of sugar (the way Harry likes it, to keep him working at all hours)?  Why a "passionate love letter" that he could and would never write, and not something that might actually represent his affections for someone, like sharing a personal secret or wish?  Why perfume and not cologne or aftershave or something?  Lace and not a scrap of leather jacket?  Chocolate and not blood shed doing the right thing regardless of cost?

There are societal-level reasons that a Harry Dresden Love Potion reads like a Wal-Mart Valentine's Day Bargain Gift Bag, and they are the same reasons that Wrath personified is always a muscular dude who murders people but Lust personified is always a curvy white woman that causes other people to get aroused.  Love and romance are girl things that are not related to male identities, but are simply catered to for the sake of naked sex times.  And, apart from Exceptional Girls like Murphy, we assume that The Women have largely interchangeable tastes, as if we don't all know women who hate chocolate or never read a romance novel or wouldn't prefer the smell of sawdust and solder to the most expensive perfumed diamonds in the world.  (I assume that a Harry Dresden Love Potion wouldn't work on a man, but would it?  What would go into a manly love potion? Beer, gunpowder, beards, and Neil Patrick Harris' voice saying the word 'turgid'?")

I'm vexed by this in particular because a lot of things in this book can ultimately (maybe) be brushed off as Dresden's own foolishness (his dismissive attitude towards Monica, his interpretations of world politics and wizard history) but this is worldbuilding on an objective level.  This is, we are told, Expert Magicking, and thus the universal power of candlelight and purple prose to make a woman tear off her own undergarments are fundamental Fact.

Anyway.  Harry pours the potions into a couple of clearly-labelled old Gatorade bottles (this chapter is full of noodle incidents like "that diet potion** you tried", "the antigravity potion, remember that", and "ever since the invisibility/hair tonic incident") and goes to bed, head full of the deadly tasks still to face, like talking to a vampire woman vampire woman.

Chapter Nine: WOMANPIRE 

Dresden awakes the following afternoon to Murphy on the phone, and says he's got no leads yet but he'll have something by the end of the weekend.  Apparently Murphy is currently being hounded by the commissioner, who likes to use her as his scapegoat for unsolvable crimes.  It's not clear what makes her a good scapegoat, unless he likes to tell people 'My best detective believes in magic but I can't fire her because somethingorother (female privilege, probably) so I am bound'.  Harry suggests that he would have more luck talking to Bianca than Murphy has had, but she forbids it:

"If you get your ass laid out in the hospital or the morgue, it'll be me that suffers for it." 

"Murph, I'm touched." 

"I'll touch your head to a brick wall a few times if you cross me on this, Harry."

The endless heaping of Murphy's tough-talk without actually seeing her do anything but beg Harry for help does not make for a compellingly deep, plausibly strong, or even vaguely interesting character.  Y'all know how I do--getting attached to the underloved female characters is like my signature move in these posts--but Murphy needs to actually be involved in something before I can particularly care.

After lunch, Dresden monologues at us for a while about how wizards aren't innately special people, but they're very good at preparations, so if they know what they're facing, they'll have a solution.  In the case of going to face a vampire madam, Dresden polishes his cane--I see you snickering there in the back--secretly holsters a silver knife, pockets his escape potion and pentacle (his mother's, given to him by his father, the first indication we have that Dresden had parents), and puts "a small, folded piece of white cloth into my pocket".  Apparently he also wishes he could bring "my blasting rod or my staff, but that would be like showing up at Bianca's door in a tank".

Dresden drives down to the Velvet Room on the lakeside, a 1920s mansion, and his car sputters out just as he arrives, leading to a not-particularly-interesting battle of bluffs between him and the predictably stupid muscly doorman, who ultimately buzzes up to Bianca and lets him in, though the guard takes the cane off him.  (What's the difference between a cane and a staff and a blasting rod?  Is there some reason he couldn't make a staff that looked like a cane?  I have many issues with the Penny Arcade dudes, but all I can think about is this classic comic.)  Dresden gets to keep his pentacle, though, and in this setting vampires are vulnerable to faith, not symbols themselves, so Dresden's faith in magic makes it a good shield.  (On this subject, I look to Fred Clark and his thoroughly alternative take on what kinds of crosses confound vampires--in his philosophy, I'm not sure whether that pentacle would work or not.)

Dresden enters the big old house, passes "a well-groomed young woman with a short, straight haircut" and waits in the library for half an hour before Bianca appears.  A sampling of the descriptions I'm having to read right now:

Her hair was a burnished shade of auburn that was too dark to cast back any ruddy highlights, but did anyway. [....] She approached me and extended her hand, a motion oozing feminine grace.

I have trouble imagining any kind of feminine oozing that could be described as 'graceful', but correct me if I'm wrong that these are words best not put in close proximity to each other.

"A gentleman, they said. I see that they were correct. It is a charmingly passe thing to be a gentleman in this country." 

"You and I are of another world," I said.

Et cetera et cetera Bianca is the most fuckable thing he's ever seen and he draws her chair out for her and she crosses her legs "and made it look good", which is just baffling me.  Anyway, he says he's here to ask about Jennifer Stanton's murder and Bianca instantly leaps over the table to tear out his throat, so Dresden hurls the handkerchief full of sunshine at her and blasts her across the room, shredding bits off her.

I had never seen a real vampire before. [....] It had a batlike face, horrid and ugly, the head too big for its body. Gaping, hungry jaws. Its shoulders were hunched and powerful. Membranous wings stretched between the joints of its almost skeletal arms. Flabby black breasts hung before it, spilling out of the black dress that no longer looked feminine. [....] Its clawed feet were still wearing the three-hundred-dollar black pumps.

Do I even need to explain all the things that bother me here?  Bianca has become 'it' instead of 'she' now that she doesn't look human, but unless Butcher is trying to do something clever here with gender assignment, it seems likely to me that the "flabby black breasts" (wild guess: some humans have those) indicate that Bianca is also a female vampire (not a genderless vampire in a female role), so what does it say that she gets her pronouns revoked for not being sexy enough?  Is there any particular reason that a key element of her hideous transformation is that her flawless white skin has turned black?  I feel these things should speak for themselves.

Dresden pulls out the pentacle and pours enough magic into it to ward her off, creating a standoff situation.  Bianca reveals that she thinks Dresden killed Jennifer, and so there's a lot of 'why should I trust you not to try to kill me if I lower my weapons' haggling.  Dresden swears "by fire and wind" (these are phrases that I want to mean more than 'it sounds cool') that he had nothing to with the murder, and they cautiously sit down again.  Bianca transforms back: "The flabby black breasts swelled into softly rounded, rosy-tipped perfection once more."

I don't know what to make of the obsession with breasts in this chapter (and others).  Is Butcher trying to go for 'scared but erect' in the reader, or can he just not help himself?  Dresden says that she looks perfectly beautiful again, but he can't forget what she 'really' looks like.

After pages of staring, they get back to the plot, but Bianca tells him "You're the only one in the city with the kind of skill required to cast that sort of spell."  Chicago proper has a population of 2.7 million, with about 10 million in the whole metropolitan area.  I don't know what percentage of those people are wizards, but 'best spellcaster in a city of ten million' seems like a pretty good superlative.  Are you a superhero or just clinging to the last rung, man?

Turns out Bianca and Tommy Tomm were old friends and she knew he was always kind to his escorts, so she feels actual remorse at whatever's going on.  Dresden can tell she's hiding something, so he locks eyes with her and they ★SOULGAZE★.

More than anything else, Bianca wanted to be beautiful. And tonight, I had destroyed her illusion. I had rattled her gilded little world. She sure as hell wasn't going to let me forget that.

Not luxury, not power, not control, not secrets or influence or independence or knowledge or any of those classic immortal vampire desires.  Nope.  Bianca, ancient deathless lady of manners, desperately wants everyone to think she's hot.  By human standards.  If I understand the worldbuilding so far, vampires aren't even from Earth; they're immigrants from some spirit world.  What kind of womanpire's most desperate wish is to make human men tumescent?  Ugh.  This is something that could be sold with a sufficiently developed backstory, but we're just supposed to take it as an obviously sensible desire at first glance.

She says she'd kill him now if she hadn't given her word, and he says he'd use his death curse to drag her to hell with him.  Bianca turns her head away, too slow to keep Dresden from seeing her shed a single tear.

What am I even reading.

Bianca reluctantly offers Dresden the name and number of Jennifer's friend (and threesome partner) Linda Randall, and they prepare to say belligerent goodbyes when Bianca notices that Dresden has started bleeding from the scratch she gave him earlier, and she starts getting overpoweringly thirsty.  She croakingly tells him to leave, but Dresden of course lingers by the door to watch her suffering as she tries not to murder him by instinct.  You're a tool, Dresden.  She tells him she'll make him regret the night, and the woman from earlier shows up.  I assume at this point the classic porn saxophone starts playing:

Paula murmured something too soft to hear, gently brushing Bianca's hair back from her face with one hand [...] and pressed her wrist to Bianca's mouth. [....] Bianca's tongue flashed out, long and pink and sticky, smearing Paula's wrist with shining saliva. Paula shuddered at the touch, her breath coming quicker. Her nipples stiffened beneath the thin fabric of the blouse [...]

Harry Dresden can see a woman's nipples stiffen under her shirt from across a dark room.

Again, I feel that is a thing that speaks for itself.

The saliva apparently gets Paula wasted, and Bianca bites her wrist open to start feeding as Paula collapses into some kind of sexual epileptic fit.  Dresden finally leaves: "The scene with Paula might have aroused me, if I hadn't seen what was underneath Bianca's mask. [....] The woman had given herself to that thing, as quickly and as willingly as any woman to her lover."  Dresden thinks a bunch about the implications of addiction to vampire saliva and the possible enslavement of wizard thralls, watches the tow truck guy work on his car for a while, and finally the doorman delivers Linda's phone number.  Dresden had been told Paula would bring it down, but realises that she isn't coming.  Dun dun DUNNN.  I assume we are to conclude that Bianca couldn't stop feeding and has killed Paula, just in case we weren't sure whether we were supposed to find her sympathetic or not.  (She's in the sex industry and she's a secretly-ugly woman; of course we weren't.)

Lest you think our suffering has ended, let me warn you that we haven't even met the sex-addicted sex worker who's sad that she can never make her clients 'feel better about themselves'.  For some reason, I didn't go into this book expecting it to be full of painfully misogynistic sex workers (the sexy corpse, the evil madam, the tragic hooker) but apparently that's what we signed up for.  See you all next time!

---

*I suppose I should make a consistent note that these books don't have chapter titles and I'm just making them up for funsies, lest new readers be confused that the titles are so much more entertaining and thoughtful than the text.

**We are also informed at some point that Dresden is that most curious kind of individual: the tall skinny man who eats constantly but mysteriously never gains any weight, also known as Every Goddamn Protagonist Ever, Sweet Buttered Jehoshaphat.  So why was he trying a diet potion, if he has no body image issues?

Erika vs The Client List

Due to my meat sack being faulty, I spend a lot of time at home and couch-bound. Which means I spend a lot of time playing Pokemon* and watching Netflix. Despite this I seem to always be behind on things I'm "supposed" to watch, or people are telling me to watch. I also spend a lot of time scrolling through Netflix seeing what's new. This is where I found The Client List. The description caught my eye: single mother turns to sex work and ends up tuned into all of the town's gossip. The last sentence is even "Can this double life lead to a happy ending?" which made me think that this was going to be almost a romcom? A movie about a sex worker taking some agency and maybe getting into some mischief with all she knows about everyone's secrets.

I could not have been more wrong.

The movie opens with Sam and her husband off to the bank to beg for an extension on their mortgage payment since they've fallen on hard times. So already I have been lied to, she's not a single mom. Her own mother swings through to look after their three kids while they're gone, and reminds her daughter that she can and should use her looks to get her way. Which she promptly tries to do, and manages to convince the bank manager to give them the extension with her freakishly perfect memory of the conversation they first had. Still, it's a stall tactic. She and her husband are both desperately searching for jobs when she finds one the next town over at a place searching for massage therapists! Perfect! She's a licensed massage therapist! We all know where this is going. It's not just massages they give. She takes the job ignorantly, walks out when she finds out what they really do, and when she realizes between she and her husband they have a dollar to their name, she slinks back.

The movie spends the rest of its time showing us how morally reprehensible sex work is and how Sam remains sympathetic because she was driven to it out of desperation. We also see that she's very good at her job because she actually talks to and engages with her customers. The movie wastes an excellent opportunity to explore that more, and brushes it over just to explain why she's so popular and is being given lavish gifts by her johns. So, first it's sex work, but she's just running herself so ragged because... uuuuhhhh.... We never actually get a good reason why she can't scale back on her own hours (something we get told very early on she has the option of doing), but we're assured that she's working ever so hard and too much, all for her family! We're shown her just being super tired a lot until she nearly falls asleep at the wheel and one of her johns gives her some coke. Naturally, if you're a sex worker you're also doing coke? She says no at first, but as she struggles to keep up with the demands of motherhood and sex work, starts to use to give herself the extra kick.

Her whole issue boils down to: she needs to scale back at work (which we are given NO reason for her not to be able to do) but refuses to. We're supposed to feel sorry for her as she goes down the "wrong" path but again, I just keep seeing someone who doesn't know how to balance life and work, and I don't know that she wouldn't have gotten into trouble in any job that offered enough hours for her to run herself ragged. We're supposed to assume it's all the sex work being so demanding, but we see her getting up early and getting home late and are told what long hours she's putting in. Her issue isn't that she's a sex worker, it's that she has no work/life/self-care balance.

Eventually things go to total shit and the cops raid the place and she's all over the news. Her husband had no idea what she was doing and this is how he finds out. He takes off with the kids while she and the other girls try to make a plea bargain for less jail time in exchange for a list of their johns (this is where the movie gets its title). Sam, with her perfect memory and excellent rapport with her clients, is able to provide enough to get the sentence from minimum two years to 30 days and a 2 grand fine.  So far the movie has done nothing but say "sex work is bad and will ruin your life". Only after serving her sentence (both jail time and a separation from her husband) and finding her way back to the "right" path (waitressing as she goes back to school to provide for her family "honestly") that she gets her life back and forgiveness from those around her.

This movie is a mess. It nearly goes places and says something a bunch of times but veers from one place to the next too quickly. She at one point admits that she didn't dislike the work, and that she liked the way her clients treated her, but that is all swept aside as part of the reason why she is Bad and Wrong for what she did. Saying "well, it's not what I wanted, but yeah, it wasn't all bad" would have made for a much more nuanced and interesting ending, but no, sex work=bad. Even as she and one of her former co-workers are lamenting the money loss, they both seem to agree it's for the best. At one point her mother apologizes for telling her that her looks would get her everywhere in life, and that she should have fostered the importance of other traits, but that's not really explored either, nor the other ways that message would seriously mess up a kid. Just: yeah, that's part of why she thought this was an okay thing to do. The women go from church to her home at one point to ask her for help since, because their husbands were going to sex workers, they personally felt they were doing something wrong. Nothing around female bonding or forgiveness or the expectation on women to please, or husbands being unfaithful not being the wives' fault, just a cute cut away after Sam grabs some bananas to start giving tips. As far as we can tell, these women all still loathe her, if their response to her apology is any indication. The movie could have been potentially somewhat salvaged if only it had taken some of these scenes just a little bit further. The only consistent messages are "sex work is bad" and "counting on your looks is bad".

I'm disappointed. Not in the movie (okay in the movie too), but in myself for getting my hopes up. I should know better than to hope for, well, anything from mainstream media about sex workers with nuance or substance. I mean, can't have a movie saying that women get into sex work for different reasons, many stay because they like it and it lets them balance finances, work, and life more easily. Or that many balance parenting and their jobs just fine without developing a drug addiction. The other girls Sam works with don't seem to have any of these problems, but that'll never get explored. Just look at how having sex for money destroyed this poor woman's life! Saying anything else might give girls ideas about the choices they might have, or, lord forbid, maybe help to destigmatize sex work so maybe it'll get decriminalized and these women can do their jobs in safer environments! Can't have that. No, better make another movie about a woman ruining her life with it. Again. That's safer. 


*If anyone wants me to add them as a friend just leave your code in the comments. My code is 1993-8573-6315

Storm Front, chapters five, six, and seven, in which Will tries to ban the author from writing women

Someone brilliant on tumblr pointed out that "I can't even" is basically the modern redux of "Well I never".

I cannot even with Dresden, folks.

Storm Front

Chapter Five: Men Are From Mars And Frankly Sometimes I Think We Should Just Be Sent Back*

Dresden has had a long day of being near naked corpses, staring into the soul of a powerful man who knows how to get what he wants, and silently judging a woman for having the temerity to not be a stupendous man-wizard badass, so he decides to unwind by going to his favourite pub, McAnally's.  I... I will--deep breaths, Wildman, deep breaths--I... will... take the high--oh my god I know it's a real name but how do you just--keep it together, man!--Iwilltakethehighroad and not make any of the extremely obvious jokes because I am a writer with some sense of decorum and maturity.

Dresden spends a full page rhapsodising the old-timey glory of the basement pub, with thirteen of all of its fixtures and wooden pillars that break up the flows of magic from all the "broody, grumpy wizards" that hang about there.  No electronics more complicated than a lightswitch, only homebrewed ale and a bar where you pick your food up yourself, LIKE A MAN, instead of having some waitress do it for you like these fancy types all expect these days.  I'm wondering how many other actual 'grumpy wizards' we're going to see, since it seems like even one more is immediately going to make it obvious how boring Dresden himself actually is.  He recognises (but doesn't name) two guys playing chess in the corner, and orders a steak sandwich and ale from Mac, who hardly ever talks but only says things that are wise.  UNLIKE A WOMAN, OBVIOUSLY.

Worldbuilding!  Harry grabs a wizard newspaper and reads to us about a story in which some kids got high on 'ThreeEye', which supposedly gives you precognition, and blew up a convenience store which they believed was somehow destined to explode anyway.  Harry doesn't buy it: "If it was serious stuff, the department would have already called me by now."  What department?  The police?  The wizard police?  Is Dresden also a wizard cop?  (Why aren't there wizard cops?  Why aren't there wizards already insinuated into the police force to handle magical crimes instead of forcing them to grab consultants like Dresden?)

Mac observes that someone followed Dresden in, and Dresden identifies "Miss Rodriguez" by her perfume, but of course, being a woman, "She probably wouldn't think about her perfume giving her identity away when she could assign my mysterious, blind identification of her to my mystical powers."

• Characters who are unnerved by Dresden's mysterious powers: Murphy, Monica, Rodriguez. 
• Characters who are unimpressed by Harry's supposed potency: Carmichael, Marcone, unnamed chapter-one mailman.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something that distinctly categorises these two groups.

In case we didn't already suspect from the surname Rodriguez, Susan is Latina, helpfully hinted at in her paragraph of description which separately includes references to her "dark beauty", "dark, straight hair", "dark skin of her forehead", and "dark eyes".  So, there's those things.  Let's just bask in the discomfort of exotification and the immediate sexualisation of the only woman of colour.  Dresden made have mulled Murphy's legs and had uncomfortable highschool-cheerleader fantasies about Monica, but Susan Rodriguez shows up and suddenly we're one misstep away from this becoming the swimsuit issue.

Rodriguez is a reporter for the Chicago Arcane, a tabloid magazine that occasionally catches the real thing (like the Unseelie Incursion of 1994, when Milwaukee quietly disappeared for two hours), and she's figured out he's a real wizard.

She was the one who had fainted after we'd soulgazed.

Her feminine vulnerability thus established, she immediately sets about using her spicy Latina sex appeal to try to drag a comment out of Dresden on the murders.

"Just a hint," she pressed. "A word of comment. Something shared between two people who are very attracted to one another."

Dresden is of course too cool to be so easily swayed, at least on the outside, but regardless of how hot she is, Dresden knows that the hottest thing about her is the way society has ingrained her with the conviction that she can and will never be pretty enough:

One of the things that appealed to me about her was that even though she used her charm and femininity relentlessly in pursuit of her stories, she had no concept of just how attractive she really was--I had seen that when I looked within her last year. 

"Harry Dresden," she said, "you are a thoroughly maddening man." Her eyes narrowed a bit further. "You didn't look down my blouse even once, did you," she accused.

Dresden remarks sarcastically on his incorruptible purity, She laughs, and he takes the opportunity to check out her awesome boobs, because HE IS A MAN AFTER ALL.

This scene is stupid and I'm not going to provide more details on it than I have to.  Dresden refuses to answer her questions even when she turns it into a cute 'yes or no' game and then uses that to 'trick' him into agreeing to get dinner with her Saturday night at a nice restaurant.

I kinda loved Ender's Game and Shadow the first times I read them, even if I brim with scorn now.  Eye of the World had a few charms, sort of like a clueless old man telling mostly-harmless stories of his youth but unable to stop calling women 'skirts'.  I already hate Dresden so much I'm honestly not sure I can get all the way through this book this time.  Already I look back fondly on a mere month ago, when I thought things were actually going to happen in this book and I hadn't gotten to know our insufferable protagonist yet.  Updates as the hatred evolves.

Dresden bemoans the ease with which she 'tricked' him into this date.  (Just not going is apparently not an issue.  Why?  Is a wizard's word literally his bond?  Did she enthrall him while he wasn't paying attention?  DOES SHE HAVE A MIND-CONTROL SIGIL IN HER CLEAVAGE?!)

"Why did I say yes?" 

Mac shrugged. 

"She's pretty," I said. "Smart. Sexy." 

"Ungh." 

"Any red-blooded man would have done the same thing." 

"Hngh," Mac snorted. 

"Well. Maybe not you." 

Mac smiled a bit, mollified.

I'm going to act like this is confirmation that Mac is ace or gay, although I presume it's actually supposed to mean that he just makes better decisions because he's too smart to get tangled up with those tricksy girlfolk.  Dresden mulls how he's going to fit this date into his schedule, and whether he should account for the possibility of naked fun times afterwards.  He is seriously concerned.  After all, he's never done well with dating:

I mean, a lot of teenage guys fail in their first relationships. 

Not many of them murder the girl involved.

Faith and fucking begorrah.  Not only is Butcher giving us a dead woman in Dresden's past to make him sad, not only did she die violently, but he is the one who killed her and you know that means that it was a tragic accident for which he blames himself and it will be the responsibility of other people to explain that Dresden shouldn't feel guilty for killing his girlfriend.

I have been induced to read these words with my own eyes and for that there can be no forgiveness.

The chapter mercifully ends not long after that and I'm going to have to read ahead a bit to see if I can survive this or if I'm just going to get angrier and angrier every chapter until I challenge the book to mortal combat and one or both of us dies amidst rain and fire.

Chapter Six: How to Pick Up

Blessedly, this chapter contains almost none of Harry's thoughts on women, and focuses on the essential premise of the book: a wizard who is also a detective.  Harry gathers up some materials from his apartment and goes on a long drive out to the Sells' lakeside home for some investigating.  After scoping a bit in normal terms (he grabs a tube for camera film under the stairs and notices the suspicious state of the garbage bins) he sets a faery trap and monologues at us about magic for a while: true names and magic circles, how they work, how you bait a faery, that kind of thing.  It's not bad, apart from my grievances with Dresden's tone, which is 60% made of the author winking at the reader (the faery disappears in a twinkle like Santa, not that Dresden would dare try to trap Santa because he's far too powerful, don't cross Saint Nick, ha ha).  Said faery, whose true name is a beautiful cadence but goes by Toot most of the time, falls into the trap and agrees to ask around on Dresden's behalf, reporting that there were people at the house last night having sex and they ordered a pizza.

That done, the author realises he's hit a lull and so falls back on Raymond Chandler's famous axiom, 'a man bursts into the room with a gun', although that's not nearly magical enough, so instead a man bursts out of the woods with a sword.

Chapter Seven: How Not To Worldbuild

The man in question turns out to be Morgan the Warden, White Council agent in charge of making sure Dresden never does anything fun at all.  He has concluded that Dresden is the murderer, on the basis that Dresden once before killed someone with magic and Morgan has just been itching to get his justifiable homicide on ever since then.  Like all the characters in this story who don't want to have sex with Dresden, Morgan is not supposed to be smart.

Dresden points out that he's done nothing illegal (apparently trapping and extorting faeries is completely legit as long as you don't actually mind-control them) and that if Morgan wants to try to prosecute him for it they'll have to convene the entire very busy and ill-tempered White Council, so he should drop it.  Morgan relents and puts away his enchanted sword, but then demands to talk to Dresden unofficially and grabs him by the arm.

I didn't dare mess around with Morgan when he was acting in his role as a Warden of the White Council. But he wasn't wearing that hat, now. Once he'd put the sword away, he was acting on his own, without any more official authority than any other man--or at least, that was the technical truth. Morgan was big on technicalities. He had scared the heck out of me and annoyed the heck out of me, in rapid succession. Now he was trying to bully me. I hate bullies. 

So I took a calculated risk, used my free hand, and hit him as hard as I could in the mouth.

Like any classic Manly Hero, Dresden has four emotions: Lust, Condescension, Wounded Pride, and Punching.  Some have theorised about the existence of umami, the so-called 'fifth emotion', but no research has yet found any conclusive evidence.  Morgan starts to threaten him, but Dresden counters that he legally doesn't "have to put up with it" unless Morgan is on official business.  Morgan can find no legal grounds to "come after" Dresden, and so lets him go.

(Good news, everyone: if you punch a cop while they're not in uniform, they're legally required to just stand there and take it, apparently.)

To my everlasting delight, Dresden thinks Morgan is too stupid to realise that there's no law against punching back, and he eventually does so, flooring Dresden in one hit.  Ten points to the old guy with the really inadvisable ponytail!  (He has a terrible ponytail, we're told.)  Having finally expressed their true feelings to each other, Morgan and Dresden part ways, and Dresden fills us in on his backstory.  To my immense shock, the magic-kill that Dresden was convicted for was not his first girlfriend like he implied, but his original magic teacher, an as-yet-unnamed dude who "tried to seduce me into Black wizardry".

Before we go any further on that subject I'm just going to give the floor to Martin Luther King for a minute:

"Somebody told a lie one day. They couched it in language. They made everything Black ugly and evil. Look in your dictionaries and see the synonyms of the word Black. It’s always something degrading and low and sinister. Look at the word White, it’s always something pure, high and clean."

White Council and Black wizardry.  Awesome.  Top marks again, Butcher.  Also,  Dresden, your male teacher tried to "seduce" you while you were young and impressionable.  Not in any way a statement with homophobic connotations.  Nothing.  [irony] Pure as the driven snow. [/irony]

So, it is legal to defend yourself or helpless people with lethal force, giving Dresden a pass on getting executed, except that apparently there's no protocol for judgment when the defender successfully kills their attacker.  I... what.  Shouldn't that come up all the time?  Obviously, whether lying or telling the truth, any wizard who kills another wizard is going to claim it was self-defence.  That is why we in the muggle world have detectives and stuff.  Why is Dresden talking like his case was such a weird aberration?

(Also, I would like to know more about necromancy in this world and whether there aren't a lot of cases that could be solved quite easily by talking to ghosts.  Can they talk to ghosts?  Is that why most wizards try not to kill other wizards?  Or is it illegal to summon the dead?  Too Black?)

So Dresden was let go from that case on super-probation, and can now be executed for breaking any Law of Magic, apparently?  He wonders if some members of the White Council don't want him dead for daring to practice wizardry openly.  I wonder why they don't have a law against that.

Dresden concludes that the only way he can clear his own name is by researching the eeeevil magic that was used to murder those two, and his best lead for that is Bianca the Vampire Madam, so off he goes, wondering if Morgan will kill him in the belief that he was the murderer, or for doing illegal research into the murder, or if Murphy will kill him for edging in on the police side of the investigation.  He is surrounded by troubles on all sides.

You know, sometimes I think Someone up there really hates me.

Me, Dresden.  It's me.

Next time: We meet Dresden's cat (charming) and haunted skull named Bob who loves to get up to zany antics like sexual assault.  If you listen to the wind, you can hear me screaming.

---

*I suppose I should make a consistent note that these books don't have chapter titles and I'm just making them up for funsies, lest new readers be confused that the titles are so much more entertaining and thoughtful than the text.

Storm Front, chapters 1 and 2, in which Our Hero is one of the "nice" misogynists

I am left with a conundrum, readers.  After much contemplation and debate, I settled on reading some of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files now that WOT is on hiatus, and valued commenter Nerem provided me with a link to the ebooks so I could commence my analysis and thus provide you all with insight and entertainment.  I have wanted to check out Dresden for ages already, so I dove right in with gratitude to Nerem for assisting me in this quest.

I'm three chapters in and the question burns at the front of my mind: is Nerem in fact trying to destroy me?

The Dresden Files are urban fantasy very intentionally riffing off the style of Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake.  They concern Harry Dresden, working-class wizard-for-hire of Chicago.  I have never wanted to inflict violence on a protagonist so early in a story before.  Ender Wiggin is an unfortunate abused child.  Bean Delphiki even more so.  Rand al'Thor is a naive farmboy with typical teenage self-obsession.  These are people who can only bear so much responsibility for their faults.

I want to fight Harry Dresden.  But rather than just ranting, let me take you on a journey into Storm Front, the first book of the Dresden Files, and soon you, too, can feel the bone-deep certainty that the world will be made a better place when this jackass meets you in the pit.

(Content: misogyny, gore.  Fun content: I've been perusing my collection of reaction images to help me adequately respond to this tool.)

Storm Front: p. 1--?*

Chapter One: These Chapters Don't Actually Have Titles So I'm Probably Just Going To Make Some Up--This One Will Be Called "The Very Banality And Innocence" Because I Love A Good 'The King In Yellow' Reference

This book is written in first-person, which is a powerful and dangerous tool for any writer to wield--there's no more powerful way to express your protagonist's persona to the reader, but it also raises questions of reliability and relativity, and an irritating narrator is to reader interest what burning windmills are to mad scientists.  If you want to know how badly a first-person narrator can skew your book's contents to readers, ask Vladimir Nabokov to stop spinning in his grave long enough to tell you how he feels about Lolita.  In the first chapter, this won't be too pressing a matter, but in chapter two we're going to very quickly run into some serious questions about how to write flawed characters.

We meet Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden (forgivably over-the-top) in his office, where a new mail carrier is delivering a package and snickering at his door, which reads:

HARRY DRESDEN--Wizard.  Lost Items Found. Paranormal Investigations. Consulting. Advice. Reasonable Rates. No Love Potions, Endless Purses, Parties, or Other Entertainment.

In general, recognising that 'love potions' are fucked up is a good way to get me to like you, so I want to open by giving Dresden points for that.  At least, I hope the reason he doesn't do love potions is because he understands they are mind-control drugs specifically optimised to override sexual consent.

The mail carrier is described as "a basketball with arms and legs and a sunburned, balding head", I y'all can bet I am going to be keeping a close gorram watch on how often Butcher makes characters fat when we're not supposed to like them.  He is initially amused, then skeptical, and finally calls Dresden "a nut" before leaving.

Any urban fantasy kind of needs to open by defining its parameters--whether people in general know about magic, what kind of organisation it has in society, whether it's resulted in any major differences from our own Earth history, all that worldbuilding jazz.  Dresden informs us that magic fell out of fashion and awareness in recent centuries because science was more exciting, but "images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who had allowed the television to raise their children" has pushed people away from "science, the largest religion of the twentieth century" and people are starting to notice magic and psychics and vampires again.

Allow me to provide a visual representation of the way I feel when people call science a religion:

Pictured: a baby harpy eagle who would rather not, today.

Science, performed and organised correctly, is about observation and reproducibility.  It is supposed to be about throwing out old ideas when new evidence contradicts them, about taking nothing for granted, and about always chasing new knowledge.  I don't know the details of every religion in the world, obviously, but I have yet to see one that tries to draw statistical conclusions about the effectiveness and consistency of prayer or invocation.  Religion is pretty big on dogma.  Science isn't supposed to be.  If you're going to call science a religion, I need you to define your terms.  (If Dresden is trying to comment on the way the populace supposedly assumed that the invention of the airplane and the computer meant no one would ever have problems ever again, okay, that can be his opinion, but I have a lot more to say about the way good scientists would approach the discovery of magic as well, which I will spare you all for now only because I need to get to the part where you share my ire towards this jackwagon.)

Anyway.  Dresden is behind on his bills and needs cash soon.  I have some questions about what magic can or cannot do, and why a person with a rare command over supernatural powers works this and only this fetch-quest kind of job.  Like, the absolute #1 question I have about magic in every single setting is 'can magic create food', because if it can, anyone with magical skills is a colossal upset to our normal economy--they don't need to worry about their own food supply and they literally always have access to a vital commodity they can trade to other people.  JK Rowling just declared that magic couldn't conjure food from nothing, which answered that question pretty firmly, except then she footnoted that magic can multiply food, which, in the words of Hermes Conrad, just raises further questions.  I'll allow Butcher more worldbuilding time before I start interrogating his hero's premise too harshly, though.

Dresden is quickly characterised for us as an honest worker; his only job in months was investigating a country singer's house in Missouri and quickly concluding that it was not haunted, unlike the fake psychic whom the singer hired a week later to perform a big fake exorcism.  Dresden describes his own actions as "honest, righteous, and impractical", and I roll my eyes at our hero humblebragging about his heart of gold.  The phone rings with a call from a nervous housewifey kind of person who wants Dresden to find her husband.  Dresden quickly says people aren't his specialty and she should go to the police, which wins him many more points from me than he got by telling me about his honesty dealing with the singer.  She tries to beg off by saying she can't go to anyone else, but Dresden cuts her off before she can hang up.

"I'm sorry, you didn't tell me your name." [....] 

"Call me Monica." 

People who know diddly about wizards don't like to give us their names.  They're convinced that if they give a wizard their name from their own lip it could be used against them. To be fair, they're right.

Dresden will keep doing this in the next couple of chapters: 'silly superstitious people who know nothing are afraid of X, but they absolutely should be afraid of it because it's terrifying and dangerous'.  It takes a specific kind of arrogance to call someone ignorant for believing a true thing even though it sounds fake.  Sigh.

Dresden convinces Monica to come to his office in an hour and explain her situation to him directly.  The moment he sets down the phone, it rings again, and a few lines of dialogue later he declares that the appointment is in forty-five minutes, which would be clever foreshadowing in a book about time anomalies but here just vexes me.  Harry Dresden would have seen nothing wrong with the many ages of Bonzo Madrid.  The second call is from Director of Special Investigations Lieutenant Karrin Murphy of the Chicago police, and she wants Dresden (her preferred magic consultant) at the scene of a double homicide pronto.  She's not worried about Dresden missing his appointment, because she is a gruff cop, and he snappishly agrees to go and be back in time anyway.  Murphy recommends that he not eat lunch on the way.

"How bad are we talking here, Murph?" 

Her voice softened, and that scared me more than any images of gore or violent death could have. Murphy was the original tough girl, and she prided herself on never showing weakness.

I brim with apprehension whenever a female character is described like this, because it strikes me as a guarantee that their tough front will eventually be shattered and they will be left a broken wreck to show that the situation is serious.  Has a male character ever been described like this?  Someone get on that.  (Also, calling an adult woman a 'tough girl' is a blaring orange flag that worse things are ahead.)

Dresden heads out, using the stairs instead of the elevator, half because electronics are unreliable in his presence and half because it's already occurred to him that if there's a murderous wizard on the streets, Dresden himself (the cops' only wizard-on-retainer) is probably a target as well.  Not bad tension-raising for the end of the first chapter.

Chapter Two: This Is It; This Is What I Was Talking About; How Badly Do You Want To Fight Dresden Now

Jim Butcher elects to give us a physical description of his protagonist by explaining all the ways he doesn't look like Murphy, which I kind of like, if only because the duality of it raises Murphy's profile as a secondary protagonist.  Dresden is an incredibly typical brooding gritty hero, tall and lean with dark hair and angular features, while Murphy is short, stocky, blonde and blue-eyed.  Dresden also immediately informs us that Murphy never wears dresses, "though I suspected she'd have muscular, well-shaped legs, like a gymnast", which is obviously not a weird thing to think about your boss.  He goes on with her description, adding her lack of earrings and her makeup-that's-so-good-it-looks-like-she's-not-wearing-makeup, which strikes me as oddly perceptive in a world so choked with men who apparently think women are born wearing a layer of foundation and Pomegranate Extremity lipstick.

Oh my god, Dresden even has a big black duster coat.  I hope Butcher was trying really hard to write to formula here.  Wikipedia seems to suggest that the cliches are intentional.  Anyway.  He also silently gives Murphy kudos for daring to meet his eyes for half a second:

It wasn't really dangerous unless you did it for several seconds, but I was used to anyone who knew I was a wizard making it a point not to glance at my face.

There is only so far I am willing to follow you down the trail of 'I have weird mysterious powers that people are superstitious and intimidated about', Dresden.  You're so powerful that it's dangerous to look into your eyes but you're also borderline unemployed and permanently broke?  I'm going to start needing justifications soon.

They head for the door and Dresden races Murphy so he can open it for her, even though and indeed because he knows it irritates her.  Ah, and here we are:

Maybe my values are outdated, but I come from an old school of thought. I think that men ought to treat women like something other than just shorter, weaker men with breasts. Try and convict me if I'm a bad person for thinking so.

Pictured: MI6 director M is entirely willing to take up Dresden's offer to go to court.

I enjoy treating a woman like a lady, opening doors for her, paying for shared meals, giving flowers--all that sort of thing.

Pictured: Special Agent Dana Scully will tell Dresden when she wants his opinion on women again, which will be never.

I don't even know what to do with this.  "Men ought to treat women like something other than just shorter, weaker men with breasts."  Well, yes, that's true.  That's true for a lot of reasons, starting with women not being shorter, weaker men with breasts.  Faith and fucking begorrah.  I guess we'll start with the purely scientific objection, which is that men being stronger than women on average tells you basically nothing about whether any given man will be stronger than any given woman, because the variations within a gender are vastly greater than the difference in averages.  (Actual studies on this are not the easiest thing to find, especially if you want studies that aren't saturated with biases, bad methods, bad data presentation, and the occasional dash of MRA meninist whining.  Suffice perhaps to compare for yourselves the current world records in that manliest activity, lifting heavy objects: yes, the men's olympic lifting records are higher than the women's, but when comparing similar weight categories, the differences are fairly small and everyone is lifting multiple times their own body weight.  Dresden, bro, do you even lift?)

Next, Dresden, have you considered that maybe the correct way to treat women is LIKE PEOPLE?  Chivalry isn't dead--it's a fricking zombie that refuses to die no matter how many times we bury it because it feeds on the keening wails of men who don't understand why opening doors for women just won't translate into getting laid.  I sometimes open doors for women, I sometimes pay for meals for women, yes, and they do the same for me, and likewise with my friends who are men.  I do these things because they are nice things to do for people I like, not because I'm trying to provide women with the support they need to get over their fundamental deficiencies of ladyness.  So the real question here, Dresden, is why you're only doing nice things for women and not men.  WHY ARE YOU SUCH A MISANDRIST, DRESDEN?

Pictured: Tulio attempts to forget the conversation he just had with a brooding antihero with a heart of chauvinist gold.  Y'all don't even know the kinds of stupid, misogynist screeds I read with my own two eyes in my quest for good data.

In short, locking women into the kitchen to be barefoot and pregnant is unquestionably terrible, but that doesn't mean that putting them on a pedestal to be delicately cared for and pruned or whatever is somehow good.  And I might not be able to convict you for being a sexist creep, Dresden, but I can definitely judge you harshly.

Where were we?  Oh, yeah, double homicide.

Dresden follows Murphy up to the seventh floor to a plush romantic suite that smells of blood.  (The elevator scene is brief, silent, and actually kind of good: "I licked my lips and looked around the interior of the car. My shadow and Murphy's fell on the floor, and almost looked as though they were sprawled there. There was something about it that bothered me, a nagging little instinct that I blew off as a case of nerves. Steady, Harry.")  Murphy leaves him in the first room for a minute, where he examines his surroundings in a vaguely ESP kind of way, making visual observations with his eyes nearly shut, noting champagne, a stray rose petal, and a half-torn black thong under a chair, which Dresden summarises as "Kinky".  Dresden has not read Fifty Shades or he'd save that for the eggbeaters.

We are then introduced to Murphy's skeptical partner, Carmichael.  Dresden rattles off a laundry list of things that are meant to make Carmichael's unattractiveness clear, starting with being fat and bald, and then goes for a swerve with "razor intellect [....] absolutely ruthless at tracking down killers".  I tentatively mark this as the second fat character we've met and the second we're not supposed to like, regardless of the 'razor intellect' remark supposedly showing that Dresden respects him.  They snipe at each other a bit before Dresden comes in to see the bodies.

Now, I realise magic is at play here, but I think it's fair to question how and why it is that these people (who died in the middle of sex) managed to remain frozen in the exact pose they had when an evil wizard literally made their hearts explode like fragmentation piñatas.  The description "she was astride him, body leaned back, back bowed like a dancer's" sounds to me like she's still more or less sitting upright, no?  Either way, now we're apparently seated in the 'erotic violence' section of the train and I'm prepared to tuck and roll.

Clues, blood, gross stuff, clues, and then Dresden finally runs out of the room to throw up--Carmichael wasn't joking when he said he'd bring a bucket.

Dresden's frantic disgusted thoughts weave in some worldbuilding:

...someone had used magic to do it. They had used magic to wreak harm on another, violating the First Law. The White Council was going to go into collective apoplexy. This hadn't been the act of a malign spirit or a malicious entity, or the attack of one of the many creatures of the Nevernever, like vampires or trolls. This had been the premeditated, deliberate act of a sorcerer, a wizard, a human being able to tap into the fundamental energies of creation and life itself.

So now we know magic does have some kind of organisation ('White Council' isn't the name I would choose, but... okay...) and laws, and we have a sort of charmingly juvenile name, 'Nevernever', for the realm of monsters.  And we're only in the second chapter!  Can you imagine how many posts into a WOT book I'd have to get before we heard about 'the Nevernever, what some call Monsterpalooza, where dwells the Scarytown Crew that you know as the Naz'gool'.

Dresden does tend a little bit that way when he starts talking magic:

"Evocation is the most direct, spectacular, and noisy form of expressed magic, or sorcery. [....] 

"What's the other option?" Murphy asked. 

"Thaumaturgy," I said. "As above, so below. Make something happen on a small scale,and give it the energy to happen on a large scale."

Which isn't bad terminology, really.  'Evocation' literally means 'calling something forth', while 'thaumaturgy' means 'magic-shaping', following the same pattern as 'metallurgy'.  I feel some small spark of hope that this will be the first fantasy series I've seen to correctly use '-mancy' suffixes only to refer to divination magic.

There's more magic worldbuilding as Dresden explains the intimacy of spellcasting and concludes that the killer had to know the victims in order to use this particular magical approach, by having intense personal reasons to want them dead. Oh, great, before this chapter can end on a strong note we have to endure another one of Dresden's pontifications on gender:

Murphy glared at me. "You keep saying 'she,' " she challenged me. "Why the hell do you think that?" 

I gestured toward the room. "Because you can't do something that bad without a whole lot of hate," I said. "Women are better at hating than men. They can focus it better, let it go better. Hell, witches** are just plain meaner than wizards. This feels like feminine vengeance of some kind to me."

Pictured: WHATNAPPLE RETURNS TO AID ME

Are you fucking kidding me, Dresden?  Jim Butcher, what the fuck?  Please tell me you're going for an unreliable narrator here.  Please don't be actually this stupid.  Please let the killer also be a man just to highlight how wrong Dresden is.

"Christ, you are a chauvinist pig, Dresden."

Lieutenant Murphy, you have my sword.

Dresden sort of agrees to try to reverse-engineer the magic, and Murphy banishes Carmichael to fetch her coffee before explaining who the victims are: the woman is a sex worker for a well-regarded company run by a vampire ("vampiress" oh my god shut up Dresden) named Bianca, and the man is the personal bodyguard to Chicago's new king of the mob, Johnny Marcone, a relatively civilised crimelord who's put an end to past bloody clashes with the police and gone all Ankh-Morpork Guild of Thieves on excessive elements in the city, doing a better job of stamping out some violent criminals than the police do.

I had honestly forgotten what it was like to have antagonists with immediate presence who are relevant to their environment and not just, like, abstract concepts and generic monsters.  I bet I'd be enjoying this book less if I hadn't just endured so much WOT.

Dresden has tried to put a disclaimer on his ability to work out how the murder spell worked, but Murphy doesn't buy it.  Dresden weasels out of explaining himself, but notes in the narration that he's got some kind of checkered past with the White Council and he's on double secret wizard probation, bearing something called the Doom of Damocles.  I like the name because it's self-explanatory (danger hanging over his head) without sacrificing some mythic flavour.  Anyway, Dresden's pretty sure he'll get a Doom to the head if word gets out that he's trying to build a murder spell, and apparently sending advance notice ("Hey, I'm tracking a murderer who broke our First Law, please don't kill me") is not an option?  He instead concludes that he'll just need to keep it quiet.  Brilliant.  If this incident is so bad, shouldn't the Council have their own investigators on the case?  Shouldn't they at least be able to spare someone to keep an eye on Dresden while he helps the police?  What are the jurisdictional rules for something like this?

They leave, Dresden's got five minutes to make the fifteen-minute trek back to his office for his appointment with Monica the mystery client, and he's halfway there when he gets surrounded by beefy goons who forcibly invite him to get into a car with Johnny Marcone, and that is where the chapter ends.

Initial impressions: Harry Dresden is a gigantic tool made of smaller tools in a sort of fractal jackwagonry array, but Murphy is a good character, I'm interested in the setting, and within a mere two chapters we've got a web of plot threads that connect us to a mysterious disappearance, a vengeful sorcerer, a vampire madam, organised crime, and the secret council that runs all magic. Rand al'Thor needs more pagetime than that to eat lunch and stare longingly at the hot girl he imagines he's in love with.  I may brim with rage throughout this book, but at least it won't linger.

---

*Thanks to ebook formatting, the pagecount varies wildly depending on how I size my reader screen, so I have little hope of keeping a consistent tally of pages as we proceed.  I'm tempted to use abstract concepts (Storm Front: p. Mangrove to Banyan) but combining that with my suggested chapter titles is just going overboard.

**ALSO I HAVE STRONG OPINIONS ON THE GENDERING OF WITCH AND WIZARD.  That's not how it works.  'Wizard' is just 'intensely wise', following the pattern of 'drunkard' and 'coward'.  'Witch' derives from 'wicce', which has a contested etymology to say the least, but originally 'wicca' was male and 'wicce' was female, and we melded both words when we took them for English.  Female wizards and male witches are 100% legit, not a weird special case, and definitely not gendered terms for identical roles.  (I'll stop here instead of further ranting on the notion that 'warlock' is the male equivalent of witch.)