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.
Thomas might be my favourite sidekick in the series.
I’ve written before about how the Denarians are like a manifestation of the corrupting influence of power made flesh in a villain (or villains). Thomas’s demon seems to be another angle of that idea. When Harry and Thomas share their soulgaze and Harry sees the White Court demon that lives alongside Thomas’s soul (for lack of a better term), it solidified this idea to me that the White Court deal with a similar problem as the Denarians.
Butcher points out that Thomas must draw upon the demon’s strength to access his superhuman abilities, which is then fed with mortal life-force (often with disastrous consequences; more on that later). I don’t know how much more literal you can get when drawing allegories to the corrupting nature of power. Your power runs on other peoples’ souls and you must go eat people to maintain it.
Which makes Thomas’ reluctance to feed and his relationship with Justine that much more impactful. Harry has this constant moral dilemma of not using his power to exploit people, and then over the course of the series gets in to conflict with other characters who do precisely that. Enter: Thomas Raith. Up until now he has been on the periphery of Dresden’s Army, but after the revelation that he is Harry’s last bit of family left (that Harry knows about anyway), he gets thrust in to the action more often.
Which, as I explored at the end of my last review, raises some uncomfortable questions. Thomas is a perpetual Trolley Cart Problem. To help Harry, Thomas must hurt people. But in the course of hurting people, he gains enough strength to save lives. Do the ends justify the means?
What I love about the reader’s deepening relationship with Thomas is that it repaints the previous books in a new light (which, I think, Butcher does a couple times over the course of the series in spectacular fashion). If we put ourselves in Thomas’ shoes, his playboy lifestyle is the most moral way to live his life. He uses almost none of his demonic power, and thus must feed a minimal amount, causing minimal direct suffering. One approach to the Trolley Problem is that of non-interaction: “If I do not interact with the system, I cause no suffering. If I do interact with the system, I cause suffering. Even if the suffering I create is hypothetically less than had I not interacted with the system, who am I to say which suffering should exist?”
I’ll leave my exploration of Thomas’ values there for now, but I’m sure it will come up in the a future review. I want to move on to discuss the context Thomas was raised in: the White Court itself.
I’ll admit I’m not a big fantasy reader, I trend more towards sci-fi in my fiction, or towards the classics with some “deep resonant meaning”, like Brave New World, 1984, or Atlas Shrugged. I mention this so as I start discussing what I think of as novel concepts in the Butcherverse, if they are actually clichés of the fantasy genre as a whole, you’ll excuse me.
Breaking up the Vampires into different “courts” with different abilities and temperaments is something Butcher does that I appreciate a lot. It gives each group more depth and personality, and allows the reader to “bucket” traits and characters together. This can be tricky when working with well established archetypes in fantasy settings, and can often lead to overcorrections to not play into archetypes.
The easiest example is all elves and dwarves taking after LotR’s elves and dwarves. If you build a world where all your dwarves are tall, regal, and anything but Scottish, the reader has a harder time processing your story because of this unnecessary cognitive burden the writer puts on them every time they use the word “dwarf”. At the same time, writers seem lazy is they have dwarves that are effectively Tolkeinesque. Like I said, tricky.
This is where the idea of the Vampire courts becomes functionally a useful literary tool for Butcher. You get to have it both ways: creating a distinct grouping (the Reds or the Whites) that share a lot of traits with the idea of vampires in the zeitgeist, while simultaneously being able to give them your own flavour. Then, when we meet a new character in one of these factions, we get to assume they have a lot of their group’s traits (“the Whites are tricky” or “the Reds are violent”) with a brief description. It then also sets that character up with a pattern of action we can assume they will take, which Butcher can then use to subvert our expectations to colour the character.
For instance, at the end of the novel, we assume Thomas will feed to the point of killing Justine at the end of the book. Justine even knows it, and is willing to sacrifice herself. When Thomas manages to pull back in the final moments, it’s much more impactful because “that’s not what a White Court vampire does!” It pulls double-duty of showing us that Thomas has incredible willpower to be able to resist the demon’s desire to feed, as well as a genuine love for Justine that drives him to accomplish this incredible feat. It also subtly implies that all the other White Court vampires that feed to the point of killing could pull back, but don’t.
Zooming out to the rest of the White court, I want to talk a bit about Lara and her father, Lord Raith. I’ll be the first to admit it: I think the sexual domination of the Raith household is icky. Thomas explains that Lord Raith has “dominated” all his sisters (through some kind of sex magic?) and Thomas is in danger of getting killed because his dad doesn’t swing in ways necessary to enthral Thomas as well. We also have Lara turning the tables on Lord Raith at the end of the novel and instead enthralling him. Perhaps I’m a prude, but that whole angle doesn’t sit right with me.
Weird incest-power-kink aside, Lara’s a great character in my books. She walks the frenemy line well, often working with Dresden and the White Council in later books, to the point where Harry has to remind himself she’s a monster. She also has this weird angle where she’ll “help” Harry by more or less tricking him in to doing what she wants (the whole Skavis arc comes to mind), but what she wants is also what he wants so it’s okay? It’s a reverse “the means justify the ends” scenario for Harry accepting help from grey morality characters like Lara.
I’m also pleased that we get to have Lara as the functional head of House Raith for the majority of the books as Lord Raith feels rather flat as a villain in this book. He gets points for being a believable bad guy after we find out that Margaret LeFay hit him with some kind of magic impotency curse when she died, as it explains why Lord Raith has been so reluctant to act personally for the last couple decades. Other than that, his plot with the pornstar witches is unremarkable (which seems unbelievable on the surface) up until they summon He Who Walks Behind.
Hoooooo boy He Who Walks Behind. I love this idea for a villain, and the Outsiders in general. I won’t spend a ton of time talking about Him now, as He shows up in more significant ways in future books, but I can’t help but gush a little. I find the outsiders juxtapose a lot of the other entities of the Butcherverse by existing outside the realm of myth and fairytale that Butcher draws from. My comparison is that the non-Outsider enemies Harry faces have an almost musical quality to their stories: the antagonists are familiar and Harry and (for instance) the Fae almost have a dance they do whenever they tango.
The Outsiders are nails on a chalkboard. Which is great for Butcher, as it gives him an antagonistic faction that is not bound by any source material he may be working from for creatures like the Fae or the vampires. And He Who Walks Behind is one of the loudest and longest screeches. The hairs stand up on the back of my neck whenever He shows up, which I consider a testament to the sheer creepy, otherworldliness Butcher has managed to convey through He Who Walks Behind. More fangirling to come in a future review.
Having covered the White Court and that whole plot, the last thing left to discuss is what I consider the B-plot of this book: Harry’s confrontation of the Black Court with Murphy and Kincaid.
The Black Court of Vampires feel like the red-headed stepchild of the Vampire Courts. We don’t get a lot of time with them, we meet one character of note (Mavra), and they like…go away after a little while. We get lots of allies and fun stories and moral problems when dealing with the White Court, and the majority of the series takes place during the war with the Reds. The Black Court ends up being a footnote, and as such I find it hard to engage with their subplots.
The scene where Dresden, Murphy, and Kincaid assault the den of the Black Court is a great sequence, but it feels out of place in this book. The one justification I have is that it sets up Mavra a bit in the next book. Other than that, the Renfields aren’t resonant enough to me to warrant significant screen-time (contrasted with another minor specie like Gruffs in the later books; they are the billy-goats Gruff. Got it. Cute.) so their inclusion as a distinct entity adds unneeded mental complexity.
The redeeming parts of the sequence are the characterizations we get out of it, though. Murphy as this holy avenging angel in Wizardvision is a call back to Grave Peril where we see Murphy’s true nature in a similar way; this radiant protector filled with righteous fury. We also develop Murphy and Kincaid’s relationship, which I personally enjoy because it helps reinforce that the world doesn’t revolve around Harry - that these characters have lives outside of their interactions with him.
And, of course, who can forget the stand off between Kincaid and Ebenezar McCoy. This is the first time Harry hears the name Blackstaff and we get to reveal more of the wider magical world through the revelations of the chat between Harry and Ebenezar afterwards. We learn that all the magical nations have a “wetworks” guy and the Council is no different, and in turns out Harry’s adoptive father-figure is also a magic assassin.
This is so significant because of Ebenezar’s philosophy that he espoused to Harry throughout Harry’s formative years that “magic comes from life” and “killing with magic is wrong”. It destroys Harry’s hero-worship of his mentor and causes him to have to reflect on his own beliefs now that the ideas that formerly grounded him are gone (“Ebenezar is good, and Ebenezar lives out and believes these ideals, thus, I should too”).
It’s the same moment all we all have when we discover our parents aren’t special - that they’re as flawed as everyone else.
It’s the crossing of a threshold into adulthood, where, sometimes for the first time, we realize that no one actually has it figured out, we’re all making it up as we go.