Heads up: I don’t tag spoilers. I often write these reviews with foreknowledge of the series, and will reference future events without warning. If you don’t want to be spoiled, turn back now.
This might be my favourite instalment in the Dresden Files.
Going through this series a couple times and engaging in this exercise of trying to tease out precisely how I feel about certain books has highlighted something I wasn’t aware of until I turned a lens to it: in almost every book, there’s some annoyance I have with it. Whether it be an extraneous plot-line, unnecessary character, or the way Jim writes a certain scene, almost every book has at least one “problem”. Granted, I’m not a critic, I’m some guy, and these are just my thoughts, so take these criticisms with a grain of salt.
All that said, this book has no problems.
Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t perfect. But I appreciate this book for a bunch of reasons, not least of all being that Butcher seems to have been able to shed some of his “bad habits” from earlier books. To skip ahead a bit, I’d say the most extraneous character is Anna Valmont. Other than that, the plot feels coherent and cohesive, all the characters we engage with are “important”, and Butcher doesn’t get too in to the weeds with any of the mechanics of magic. It’s a solid ride from beginning to end.
Now, let’s talk about that ride. At its core, this is a book about a MacGuffin. I don’t want to focus too much on the MacGuffin though, or even the events surrounding what is basically one long game of Hot Potato that is this book’s plot. I want to focus on the players, because I think they make this book (and whole series) shine.
In the red corner we have the Denarians. Coming from the Christian tradition myself, this is such a cool concept for a group of villains. I think one of the best characterization moments for the Denarians comes when Harry asks about how, if the church has been fighting them for two thousand years, and keeps taking coins and locking them away, how is it that the coins get back out in to circulation so consistently? This highlights the idea of the corrupting influence of power, and how the coins themselves aren’t the problem. It’s our human nature and the temptation of power that’s the real problem. I’ve heard it said that the best villains never die, so “the corrupting influence of power” seems like it would make a superb villain.
Of course, I can’t talk about the Denarians in general without talking about one in specific: Nicodemus Archleone. What a guy. What an incredible villain. I love Nick, and I’m not afraid to say it. He has all the hallmarks of what I consider a top-notch villain.
When I think about villains, I think a lot about Syndrome from The Incredibles:
“You sly dog, you got me monologuing!”
That lamp-shading of a villain trope sticks with me and has ruined a lot of otherwise good media. I can’t stand it any more when some supposedly big bad evil guy doesn’t do the thing and instead has to give the heroes time to recover. This is noticeable in media not directed explicitly at adults, since most of the time you have to skirt around violence and outright killing someone when it’s the most expedient option.
Which I think is what makes me love Nick so much. He and the Denarians just kill people. No monologues. No taunts. You just die. The end. I find it so refreshing and it puts me on edge whenever they show up in later books because you can never feel safe. It also feels thematically consistent with who Nick is and the ancient nature of the Denarians in general. I can picture Nicodemus in 200 A.D. taunting some Roman general and almost getting skewered right then and there. At this point, he wants to get on with his plans for world destruction, to hell with the talking. He almost seems jaded with the whole business of villainy, which makes him more callous and ruthless.
To top it all off, it’s not enough that he’s “pure evil”. He’s also fucking creepy as shown by his relationship with his daughter Deirdre. It moves him out of ruthless bad guy territory and into the territory of wrong. And I think it suits him. He’s totally inhuman at this point (to the reader at least… looking at you, Michael), so fully corrupted by Anduriel and the allure of power that he almost has the obligation to be as inhuman as possible. When Harry talks about fighting the monsters and keeping back the predators that lurk in the shadows, there is no better example of that kind of creature than Nicodemus.
But you can’t have good bad guys without good good guys. And there are no gooder guys than the Knights of the Holy Cross.
There’s another annoying trope that, once pointed out, gets hard to ignore, and shows up often in lazier media. It goes: “The bad guys are doing Bad Things, and the good guys stop them the end”. It’s easy to characterize the heroes as anti-villains, but it ends up creating characters that don’t have any defining traits themselves, and are instead defined by their much more interesting counter-parts (see: Batman).
I know I’m sounding like I’m stuck on repeat, but another W for this series is how the Knights feel alive and autonomous, not bound to being anti-Denarians. For instance, we’ve established Michael as a dear friend to Harry and a family man, and his relationship with his kids and his wife makes him feel vibrant and alive. I won’t get too much in to it now, but a lot of the Carpenters end up getting a good amount of screen time, and I’m not the least bit upset about it.
We don’t get much out of Sanya’s backstory this book but he also grows in to another relatable and important character. I adore how he asserts that he’s an atheist and doesn’t believe in a God while being a Knight. Butcher has this great way of being able to have characters go against their archetype without it feeling forced. I’ve seen lesser works where characters are quirky for the sake of being quirky, but when Butcher does it, it somehow feels natural. When we later learn that Sanya used to hold one of the coins and Shiro ultimately turned his life around, it makes a ton of sense how Sanya could get wrapped up in this job without believing in the divine.
Speaking of Shiro, let’s talk about the last Knight. It’s a little sad we only get one ride with Shiro, but what a ride it is. His sacrifice for Dresden when he turns himself over to the Denarians is what I meant when I thought of the Knights not being simple anti-Denarians. His character is so powerful it echoes forward through the novels, and deservedly so. He is truly heroic, and his death heaps more wood on the “Kill all the Denarians” fire, for both Harry and the reader. I’m still unsure how I feel about the revelation at the end that he had limited time due to his cancer, and knew it. It undercuts his sacrifice a bit, but not by much. I’ll get back to you.
Man this book has one star-studded cast! I still have a couple characters I want to cover. Okay, rapid fire time:
We meet Butters! As Dresden gets more powerful (which he kinda has to for the series to have any sense of increased stakes), I always appreciate having someone along who is out of their depth. Near the beginning of the series, it’s Harry himself, later on Molly ends up taking over that mantle, and spattered throughout it’s the vanilla mortal du jour who gets to scream “what the fuck was that thing!” Butters fills this role on occasion, as well as being a handy functional literary element: medical aid not tied to a hospital.
I think it’s smart to not have Harry stuck in a hospital all the time (“my magic might interfere with life support systems”), so having a Bones-esque dammit-Harry-I’m-a-mortician-not-a-doctor around is handy to keep the story moving forward after a couple of scrapes. I find Harry has that Spiderman-like quality of getting the shit kicked out of him all the time, which helps ground him as still vulnerable and relatable while hurling crazy fire magic around. I’ll certainly talk more about Butters in future reviews.
Next up: Ivy and Kincaid! I read the canonical six Dune books the first half of 2020, so the notion of preternatural knowledge passed from mother to daughter gave me Big Bene Gesserit Energy. Ivy is more than that though, as she also gains knowledge of everything written down, but the comparison still stands in my mind. She wields a ton of (magical) power during the duel between Harry and Ortega, and she has that Bene Gesserit-style wisdom beyond her years (which, by the way, is another instance of Butcher playing against type while still feeling natural: a being with tremendous amounts of human knowledge and tons of magical power contained in the body of a little girl).
I lump Kincaid in with a subset of magical folk we meet throughout the series as half-magic and half-mortal, kinda like the series itself. I think of characters like the Changelings, who are children of mortals and Fae, or Thomas, child of the White King and a mortal. You could draw a parallel with Greek mythology here: the full-blooded magic folks are like the Olympians and these half-and-half characters are like some of the old heroes (Perseus, Theseus) who feel much closer to humankind than their parents because of this mixing. I feel like we never get a complete view of Kincaid, but his actions certainly paint an interesting picture I’ll explore in future reviews.
Lastly, I want to talk about Anna Valmont, because I want to own up to a somewhat silly mistake I made when I first started reading the Dresden Files. I started the series at Skin Game, which is notably the one other book Anna shows up in. When I first read it, though, I had no idea this was her second appearance, so I put her on par with Murphy until I got around to actually reading the series in its entirety. If I am to be intellectually consistent, I’d say Anna is probably the most extraneous character in this book, though she is somewhat redeemed with her fight through the Underworld.
Alright, I want to make two more points, and then I’ll stop gushing.
I’ve made this somewhat nebulous point about there being “no extraneous characters”. It’s a big problem I have with the first couple books that makes them less enjoyable for me. For instance, Harry’s apprentice in Fool Moon, the CIA agents, Tera West, Ferrovax in Grave Peril, and Lydia all get pretty heavy screen time in their book, but then just…go away. I can’t fault Butcher for it, as I can’t imagine when he was writing those first couple novels he was planning on hitting it big with (at time of writing) an 17-book-long series. But, because these characters don’t go anywhere, it can feel a little pointless to try and invest in them when doing a re-read.
To contrast those characters to Death Masks, effectively every major character ends up coming back and being important to the overarching plot of the Dresden Files later on. Where this stuck out to me most was the revelation that “Father Vincent” was actually Quintus Cassius, one of the Denarians, masquerading as the now deceased actual Father Vincent. To me, this tied together all the plot threads this book had on the go, and creates such a memorable scene. Harry is no saint, and his brutalization of Cassius echoes forward through the series: it further defines who Harry is and the contrast between his philosophy and the Knights’; it gives Cassius a really good reason to come back for Harry; it sets up a heroic moment for Mouse and Butters; it shows how callous the Denarians are to their own when they are no longer “useful”. The layered meanings in scenes like that are what make this series so special to me.
To top it all off, this is the book where we discover Marcone’s secret shame. We learn more about the girl in the coma in later books, but seeing this incredibly human moment where Marcone is reading to this unconscious girl in a hospital far away from his empire layers ever more complexity on to him. Couple that with the fight on the train cars and the fact that he saved Michael and Harry when he could have left them to die moves him out of purely “bad guy” territory and in to some weird moral gray area.
Which, I think, is hard on Harry. In the initial books, Harry wants to classify beings as either “monsters” or “not monsters”. Marcone is a monster. But now, he is also not a monster. We’ll see how this plays out in later books, but with Harry’s penchant for protecting women and children, sharing core values with a monster like Marcone must be deeply unsettling.
“If Marcone is a monster with the same core values as me, could I become the monster the White Council fears while still maintaining my core values?” Scary thought, Harry.