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.
Of the myriad words I would use to describe the Dresden Files series, one word I would not use is scary.
Alright, now that I got that out of the way: this book is scary. Granted, I’m not a horror kind of guy when it comes to my regular media diet, so most media only needs to register a two or three on the Spookymeter for it to get to me. But something about this book gets to me. I even had a bit of trepidation about re-reading it when I was thinking about doing a re-read of the series.
Having now read it a second time, it’s not so bad. But there are elements that are uncomfortable and drive that primal part of your brain that doesn’t like the dark and giant scarecrows. Of course, that tone fits thematically well with the concept of our main antagonists: the fetches.
As with the last book and the Kemmlerites, these villains feel sort of “monster of the week”ish to me (almost literally in this case). I’m not sure we ever get a full explanation as to why the fetches are coming out of Faerie and preying on people; they’re mentioned offhand to be some of Mab’s elite guards, so perhaps this is all set up to push Molly towards becoming the Winter Lady? I doubt it, because that seems like an accident to everyone when it happens.
I guess at the end of the day it doesn’t matter - there are big spookies coming after a damsel in distress and Dresden is on the case. The good news is, for this book, the antagonists aren’t holding up our A plot like in Dead Beat. They’re more of a nuisance who show up every so often to shake things up. The real story here is that Molly is a warlock.
The scene that kicks off this book - the kid accused of first degree warlockery and being summarily executed like an animal - helps set the stakes of what we’re dealing with. If the reader is familiar with the series at all, we already know Harry has a chip on his shoulder over the treatment of warlocks, especially kids. But that introductory scene makes no bones about it: the White Council does not fuck around when it comes to Black Magic.
Which ratchets up the tension when we find out the warlock who has been invading peoples’ minds is Molly. I’ve tried to figure out where I land on the whole situation Molly created with her mind magic. The idea of a young, haughty kid with power forcing their friends to fear their drugs is a unique angle. And then there’s this extra piece tacked on about how Nelson (Molly’s boyfriend in case you forgot his name like I did) was the father of her friend’s baby, and that caused Molly’s mind magic to go in to overdrive which messed up the spell. All told, it makes enough sense, but looking forward in to the series, it doesn’t jive with the Molly we end up growing to know (it sort of jives with the character of the Rag Lady though. Hmmm…)
The part where it falls apart for me is at the end where she tries to seduce Harry. That scene is so uncomfortable, though I’m glad Jim (through Harry) shut it down real quick by dumping the cold water on her. Still, Butcher was the one who manufactured the scene in the first place. Again, it feels out of place with the Molly character we end up getting to know, which perhaps was not as fleshed out at the point this book was written as she is at time of writing.
All in all though, I’m so happy Molly joins Dresden’s Army as a permanent (and increasingly important) member. I’ve mentioned before that, to keep the series feeling grounded while also allowing Harry to grow in power (to continually ramp up the stakes), we need characters that are “out of their depth”, magically speaking. Molly ends up carrying that torch for a decent amount of time, and combined with her haughtiness, we get some great scenes in later books where she’s told to sit the fuck down, which helps sell the high stakes (I’m thinking specifically of a scene in White Night where Harry almost roasts her with the mini-sun).
Molly isn’t solely coloured by her own actions, though. One of the other aspects of this series I love is the recurring cast of moderately important side characters. I’d relate it to a series like “The Simpsons”, where the show doesn’t just star the titular family with a handful of close friends to fill in the narrative gaps. You have hundreds of characters in that cast, all with defined backstories and personalities. I’m aware that it gets taken too far (see Flanderization), but the Dresden Files strikes a balance that helps draw me in to a world that feels alive; not one that revolves around the heroic protagonist whom all other characters orbit like celestial bodies, hoping he does something interesting near them.
Which brings us around to the Carpenters - more specifically, Charity.
I’m so glad Jim has had Charity “come around” on Dresden; her first couple appearances in the series where she’s staunchly against him feels so one-note and somewhat unjustified. Well, until this book, that is.
Any time spent with the Carpenter family is time well spent in my books, and the scene with Harry and Charity in the chapel is one of the best. Once we learn about Charity’s history with magic, it starts to make more sense why she had an inherent dislike of Harry. Couple that with this image of him being this idyllic bad-boy hero that has (somewhat unintentionally) lured Molly in to the world of magic, and Charity springs to life as so much more than the “tired angry wife” trope. We get to see her as a fiercely loyal and devoted mother and wife - one that would do anything to ensure her family’s safety. Even foregoing her own magical gifts.
It turns out, though, that Charity doesn’t need her magic to kick ass.
I count the storming of Arctis Tor as the first instance of Dresden’s Army being fully operational. We have a couple “regulars” show up for the big fight, both vanilla (Murphy and Charity) and magical (Thomas, Lily, Fix, and even Maeve ends up allegedly helping by manipulating the flow of time in Faerie). These larger-scale confrontations are a step up from battling Victor Sells in his beach house, and give the whole series a more “epic” fantasy vibe.
Although the set-up for this final confrontation is awesome, the actual execution feels like a mixed bag. I love the scene in the horror movie theatre, where the gang fights off these jump-scare fetches and leads to one of my favourite interactions in the whole series - when they are looking for the third and final fetch and Dresden asks how they know there will be three:
“Because they’re fetches, Harry”
I love that interaction so much because it shows Butcher is fine hand-waving some of the more “technical” aspects of the magical lore away. I found Grave Peril got bogged down with the metaphysics of how The Nightmare worked, and I think Fool Moon had similar problems. This one little interaction is indicative of a writing style shift where Butcher doesn’t feel the need to explain everything, and I think it helps keep the pacing up in future instalments.
Okay so we kill the third fetch in the theatre (because there’s always three), and then we head off to the big showdown at the O.K Corral: heading in to Arctis Tor. We have to leave Lily and Fix to mind the door, brave freezing winds and an uphill climb to find our way to a fortress made of black ice that is….already empty.
Whomp whomp.
There’s one big bad guy left. Which is for the best, since the Army still barely makes it out of there in one piece. It did feel somewhat underwhelming to have this Citadel of Doom in the heart of Winter be almost empty by the time our heroes arrive. The implication it sets up (Harry smells brimstone, which means Denarians) around the Black Council and the Outsiders and all the other Big Story Stuff is interesting in its own right; I just wish the Army had more baddies to kick around than one giant scarecrow and a couple lackeys.
Scarecrow fight aside, we do get some rather mysterious plot hooks set up when we find Lea, who’s encased in ice and clearly bonkers, and is being “tortured back to health”? Leave it to Mab I guess. We also get to see what became of Lloyd Slate, the “current” Winter Knight. Yikes. I think this imagery of Slate, brought to the brink of death to then get restored to start the slow cycle of pain and misery over again, more than anything else in the series, shows us the depth of Mab’s cruelty. It also highlights how desperate Harry must have felt when he accepted the mantle himself.
All said, we kick the crap (straw?) out of the scarecrow, leave the toturees to their torment, and leg it out Faerie. To add even more sad trombone noises to the previous “whomp”s, there’s this second underwhelming story beat where the entirety of Winter is descending on the group as they try to escape. Which they do. With almost no interference from “the entirety of Winter”.
I think the climax of this book hits too close to my feelings on the climax of Dead Beat. The epic showdown with the big bad pales in comparison to the more personal story of conflict that preceded it: Cassius is to the horror theatre as the Kemmlerites are to the Scarecrow. Something about these more intimate fight scenes with arguably weaker enemies feels more visceral than the big showdowns.
Given all that, I do like this book. It sets up Molly, it has the turning point of Jim not over-explaining the magic, the plot has a nice simple bow put on it, and we get our first look at Dresden’s Army.
The one “loose end” I would consider cutting is the whole Madrigal bit. I imagine his introduction was to help set up White Night, where we go full White Court internal squabbling. It’s funny in later series when Harry can reference that he was once almost sold on eBay, but otherwise, this subplot doesn’t add much to the story, and could have been left out. Madrigal also does that annoying “call your family by your relationship to them” thing, which drives me nuts.
I have never called my sister “Sis”, or any of my cousins “Cuz”. I call them by their people names. Because they’re people, not props. I think what irks me most about this tired trope getting used in the Dresden Files is that it’s lazy writing, and this is something Butcher most certainly is not.
I’ll use the myriad nick names Harry comes up with for Molly as a counter-example: Molls, grasshopper, and padawan. This works so much better because it conveys the same level of closeness as a character calling out specifically that they are family, but with added context. Simple permutations of their given name (Molls, Hobbit, Tommy and Karrie all spring to mind from various points in the series) imply that the characters have spent enough time together that their names have hit semantic satiation for one another. Grasshopper implies the master/apprentice relationship, as does padawan, but padawan adds another layer to the relationship implied between the two characters: they both know and like Star Wars.
These are all miles better than “Cuz”.
Yes this is nitpicky, but I also think it’s necessary from Butcher to force this information upon us, assuming he is planning for White Night. I assume this because it’s the only reason I can think of to have this subplot around. I couple this “information forcing” with the appearance of the jann, who, while similar to other scions in the series (Kincaid and the changelings), goes nowhere and then dies. Djinnis are also left behind after this one reference. Which leaves me thinking that Butcher felt he had to have some kind of call forward in this book to set himself up for the next one. It’s too bad that this information couldn’t fit more neatly in to the existing plot.
I would love to someday get a look at Butcher’s notes for the series over time. I have my suspicions about which plots and characters get tacked on post-hoc to push the overarching narrative forward, and which elements were intended to set up more, but end up disappearing from the series (looking at you, Tera West). Aside from the Madrigal plot, which to me seems like a clear post-hoc addition, the other element that seems post-hoc is the Black Council/Outsider war that comes up right at the end.
As Ebenezar and Harry are “comparing notes”, they jump to a lot of conclusions that feel under-developed to me. They end up agreeing on the fact that there is some sort of Black Council that is wreaking mayhem in the magical world, who are responsible for not only the mishaps in Harry’s life, but broader events the world over: the implied Denarian attack on Arctis Tor and the raid on the Wardens’ training camp. They also intuit that one of the members must be highly placed in the White Council to have access to the kind of information they seem to have. There’s also a reference to Outsiders showing up at the raid on the Wardens, implying the Black Council is playing for pretty high stakes.
My belief that it’s a post-hoc addition added near the end of the creation of the book is because it comes across as a lazy exposition dump. A couple significant narrative bombs get dropped in that one scene, which ends up overwhelming the reader. I much prefer the “slow-burn” style that Butcher is great at, where he reveals the big picture slowly, through the actions of characters. Skin Game is a great example (that I’ll talk about in due course) that gradually reveals the layers of plot going on in that book, without having to have characters come out and say it. A couple characters do come out and say it all at the end, but even then they add subtle nuance that the reader may not have picked up on (I know I didn’t).
A great book feels like a beautifully woven tapestry, with plot, setting, and characters as the thread. So many of the Dresden Files books are not only tapestries in and of themselves, but they weave together existing threads from other books in the series (or even threads from the zeitgeist) to create a work of art of such a sheer scale that it is by itself impressive if only for its size. These post-hoc feeling additions are like patches added to that tapestry, and they bother me more by what they take away than what they add: they destroy the feel of a “grand design”, reminding me that Butcher is indeed mortal, as are we all, and even he can make mistakes.