I’ve fallen back in love with reading.

When I was in grade school, we had reading programs (clubs? I have no idea what they’re called) that I would join. They involved reading from a selected list of books appropriate for the grade level, and if you read a majority, you got to vote in (and attend) an awards ceremony for youth literature. I also remember reading a ton of the Animorphs series, the Goosebumps books, and of course, the marquee book series of my generation: Harry Potter.

Sometime during high-school, I fell out of love with reading for pleasure. During university, academia took over my reading list, and further pushed me away from reading for pleasure. Which is a damn shame, because there are a lot of great books out there.

Thankfully, I’ve caught the bug again in recent years. At time of writing, I’ve read 26 books this year, and intend to finish book 27 before the New Year. This is probably a record for me, so I wanted to take some time to reflect on what those books were, and how they ended up on my backlog. I won’t be writing about what I read in chronological order, but will instead try to group them under logical headings, and make some observations about those categorizations.

Wrapping up The Dresden Files

• Dresden Files: Cold Days
• Dresden Files: Skin Game
• Dresden Files: Peace Talks
• Dresden Files: Battle Ground
• Dresden Files: Side Jobs

In 2020 Jim Butcher broke a bit of a dry spell and released two more books in the Dresden Files series. If you’re unfamiliar, the series is about a wizard with a gun, living in modern-day Chicago. It’s probably my favourite book series right now, and these two books are the first to come out since I got in to the series ~4 years ago. I read Peace Talks almost right away, but after finishing it, I realized I had forgotten a lot of minor plot-points from the preceding fifteen (!) books.

So, like any sensible person, I decided to re-read all the Dresden Files books before tackling Battle Ground. And I’m glad I did. I find the books to be pretty light reads in general; the pacing is quick, the diction is often simple enough that you don’t get caught on it, and (having read the books already, sometimes multiple times) the plot is generally pretty easy to follow.

It was off the back of that binge that I came into 2021. And, I gotta say, I 100% do not regret it. The series slows down for me around books nine through eleven, but otherwise it’s an outstanding read the whole way through. Special mention to my top three: Changes, Skin Game, and Battle Ground (yeah, if you haven’t gotten around to reading the new one yet, it’s super fun. Unless you’re Detective Rudolph).

Discovering Conn Iggulden

• Wolf of the Plains (Conqueror Book 1)
• Lords of the Bow (Conqueror Book 2)
• Bones of the Hills (Conqueror Book 3)
• Empire of Silver (Conqueror Book 4)
• Conqueror (Conqueror Book 5)

The Mongol conquests have become a bit of a fascination of mine. I got around to watching Netflix’s Marco Polo series this year, which re-ignited my interest in this corner of history. I was discussing the TV series with my best friend and he brought up the Conqueror and Emperor series, thinking they would be right up my alley.

I gotta say, he was right. The books are an engaging ride alongside Ghengis and his successors (Ogedai, Guyuk, Mongke, and Kublai), with the first book solely devoted to the transformation of Temujin into the Great Khan. I think part of my love of the Mongol conquests comes from the notion that they are never seen as “the good guys”. I think there are rarely “good guys” in history anyway, but often the histories passed down to us have a bias towards the author(s) (and with good reason; if the Emperor Justinian is asking for a record of his time ruling the Empire, the history we get is going to paint him in the best light possible to ensure the book and the author continue their existence).

Lots of the accounts we have of the Mongol horde paint them as barbarous herdsmen, charging in mindlessly from the steppe to destroy civilization. I think Iggulden does a great job of balancing this view of the Mongols with a more realistic one. The author portrays Orlok Tsubodai as a master tactician, and Ghengis and his family are often shown bringing in “outsiders” to consult with them on matters of war and state. “My word is iron” is an oft-repeated line in the book, referencing the Mongols’ sense of honour and the importance of oath-keeping. The Mongols are not “mindless”; they conquered (and kept!) a large chunk of the known world under their nominal control for generations.

And of course, there’s the great “what if” of the Mongol conquests. The Mongols made it to the outer gates of Western Europe when they invaded Hungary, and it’s an interesting thought experiment to consider what the world would look like today if the descendants of the Roman Empire instead became the descendants of the Mongol Empire (and a fringe wing of the Empire at that). I think Dan Carlin was the person that brought that historical possibility to my attention during his Wrath of the Khans series.

All in all, a great series about a fun corner of history, and I can’t wait to dive into his Emperor series next year.

The Classics

• The Man in the High Castle
• Fahrenheit 451
• Dune
• Stranger in a Strange Land

As much as I can, I try to leave room in my reading schedule for some classics. I don’t have a great definition for what I consider a classic, aside from it having a high-profile and being written before I was born. I like reading books that are widely considered “great” to try and broaden my perspective. I think we’re in an interesting media climate, where most media is either super broad (and thus super bland) or super niche (and thus interesting, but to a narrow slice of the population). I don’t know if either of those categories lend themselves well to longevity.

Reading classic literature helps me submerse myself in a culture other than my own, which can help me step back from the chaos of the always-on mode of being most of us find ourselves in. Take The Man in the High Castle - an alternate history where the Axis powers won WWII and divided up America between Japan and Germany. I’ve lived almost entirely during the American Empire phase of world history, so it’s hard for me to even fathom that, for a while, this reality was not a foregone conclusion. Reading that book helped me empathize with someone who saw Nazi Germany expand to almost the whole of Europe, and probably didn’t need much help imagining what it would take for the German war machine to cross the Atlantic (hint: not much).

These great works help tell the broader story of humanity (at least, in the English-speaking world). When someone catches the zeitgeist and has something to say, it gains an aura. These are the kinds of books I’m talking about when I think about the classics. They spoke to a large chunk of our ancestors in a profound way. Why? Was it a hopeful vision of the future, or a terrifying warning? Did it pose an interesting question? Did it make people sit back and reflect on some recent event in a new light? I think all great books do these things, but it often takes time to sieve the really great ones from merely the good ones.

Oh, and I read Dune again, because the movie Dune (2021) was coming out. I saw it. Was great, thoroughly enjoyable.

Recommendations From Near and Far

• Wings of Fury
• War of Art
• There is no Anti-memetics division
• TRIBE
• The Order of Time
• Between The World and Me

As someone who is rather public about his affection for books, sometimes, people have the audacity to recommend me books. Sometimes, I even read them.

I often find recommendations (from humans) hard to deal with, as they seem to be largely informed by recency bias and the personal tastes of the referrer, not the referee. This year I happily bucked that trend, and was able to enjoy (most) of the book recommendations I had accrued - from friends, internet personalities I follow, and the Amazon algorithm.

I have a review up for Tribe and a forth-coming review of Between the World and Me, so I’ll say go read those if you want to know what I thought. I also don’t have much to say on The War of Art; it felt less like a proper book and more like a collection of tweets, albeit pretty high-quality ones at that. I will call out one helpful anecdote, where he talks about putting on his lucky pants and sitting down in his lucky office chair and pointing this toy cannon at himself to “fire creativity into his brain” or some such nonsense. He uses all that fluff as a way to criticize the idea that you can only write when “inspiration strikes”. Since reading that story, I’ve tried to be more intentional about picking a spot in the house and then forcing myself to sit there with nothing to do but write for 60-90 minutes. It works sometimes.

I wish I could remember who recommended me The Order of Time because it broke my brain. I am in no way cut out for the level of understanding of physics one needs to have to grasp that book. And I’m pretty sure he dumbed a lot of it down for us mortals. It’s an entertaining read, and made me think about time in an…uncomfortable way. From what I remember, time basically doesn’t exist at a fundamental level. Which is bananas.

On the other end of the spectrum, There is no Anti-memetics division was this fun, light, pulpy dive into a universe where a memory monster destroyed the world and gets defeated by the power of forgetting. It’s directly inspired by the SCP foundation, which is an internet rabbit-hole I’ve fallen down a couple times (and, if this is the first time you’re hearing about SCP, you may want to clear your schedule before clicking that link). It’s pretty light on the horror elements which is perfect for me, and it had some cute scenes around how to fight monsters that attacked memory. There’s this one scene near the beginning where an SCP is chasing a character while eating their memories, and the SCP keeps asking about the character’s family. They devolve right in front of our eyes from “raised by mom and dad with sibling” -> “raised by just mom” -> “I was an orphan and never knew my parents”. At the end of the scene we discover this has happened multiple times, and agents of the anti-memetics division focus on training their reflexes and subconscious, as they can’t rely on anyone recalling their training.

And then there’s Wings of Fury. I wanted to like this book. It’s an interesting spin on the classic Greek Gods mythology, where the Titans ruled the lands as powerful overlords and the Gods were like - minor super heroes? Superhuman but not overwhelmingly so. The main characters we follow in this book don’t even know they are Goddesses until the final confrontation with the Titan and main villain of the story, Cronus. Which is a fun reveal. My major gripe is every so often there’s this randomly inserted hyper-feminist remark that takes me out of the experience. Maybe it’s supposed to be a more overt feminist story and I missed the cues? Who knows. I finished it, but won’t be following up on the series. Which is too bad, the reimagining of Greek mythology can be great if done well (see the recently-ish released game Hades as an example).

Reading Dr. Peterson

• 12 Rules for Life
• Beyond Order: 12 more Rules for Life

If you know who Jordan B. Peterson is, you probably have an opinion about his work.

I’ll admit I generally enjoy a lot of his content, if I don’t always agree with it. He can be a controversial figure, so I’ll admit to some hesitancy to even write this section. That being said, I don’t want to come across as someone who is trying to have his cake and eat it too: I am a fan, so this is a fan’s reading of both of these books.

They’re okay.

I think his speaking style doesn’t translate super well to the written format - I’ve found his lecture series on YouTube much more engaging and coherent than the books. If I’m remembering correctly, he does the audio book version of Beyond Order himself, and probably does the audio version of the original 12 Rules for Life, too. I also believe he recommends the audio version of Beyond Order over the text version as he can put breaks and emphasis on different parts of the work more easily.

As someone who has followed his work for a while and is familiar with a lot of the ground he likes to cover (the Big 5 personality traits, Jean Piaget, Solzhenitsyn, Egyptian mythology), the books felt a little redundant to me. He covers a lot of the same messages and ideas, but in a written format instead of a video one. Which is fine. I think producing the same content across different mediums is a great way to engage different audiences. For me, though, it’s a little disappointing to not get any new material. Which is a lot to ask from a guy who had a hell of a time writing the latter half of this series (I’ll spare you the details).

The material is so familiar to me it feels hard to evaluate them as books to recommend. He’s also such a polarizing figure that I doubt anything I say would sway you for or against them, unless you had never heard of Dr. Peterson up until this post. Assuming I’m writing for that audience, I’ll say this: if you feel like you don’t have a solid idea of what your life is and where you want it to go, read these books. If you’re someone who wants to do some introspection, but don’t know where to start, read these books. If you feel like the world is insanity and you don’t fit in anywhere amongst all the yelling, read these books. They might help.

The Category of Books That Didn’t Fit in Any Other Category

• The Righteous Mind
• The Orion Mystery
• The Planets
• Harry Potter and Philosophy

In brief: I have a review up for The Orion Mystery that I’m actually pretty proud of, so go read that if you want to know about a whacky Great Pyramid conspiracy from the 90s. The Planets was a book I found in my father-in-law’s library that had this cool format where each chapter was about one of the planets in our solar system (plus the moon plus Pluto). It broke chapters up into two parts: a scientific discussion about the planet, and a short sci-fi story about the planet. It was neat. Nothing ground-breaking; just a nice little snack of a book. Last, Harry Potter and Philosophy is a book I’ve had for ages and never read. Part of the “and Philosophy” series, of which I also own The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy. The books attempt to introduce philosophical concepts (like the mind-body problem or the Ship of Theseus) through the lens of pop culture, with varying degrees of success. Wanted it off my backlog.

Which leaves The Righteous Mind.

I plan to write a full review for this book, because it’s probably in my top five books of all time, and I have a lot to say about it. When I first read it four (?) years ago, it shattered my way of thinking about interpersonal relationships. I still think about the Elephant and the Rider when people are behaving “irrationally” (he has this analogy about our emotions being an elephant and our logical mind being a rider that can sort of influence it, but not by a lot). I think about being WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rational and Democratic), and how all my friends are WEIRD, too. I think about his example that takes both left-leaning and right-leaning politics to their logical conclusions, and both fail.

This book helped me come to terms with a simple truth that feels like it doesn’t get said enough: we need each other. Badly. Even the people who think differently. Especially the people who think differently.

During this pandemic I’ve been exposed to both sides attacking a caricature of the other: those who lean left attack the “backwards, brain-dead, anti-science anti-vaxxers” and those who lean right attack “boot-licking, snowflake, herd-mentality medical-fascists”. Neither of these views are accurate, or helpful. It was after reading The Righteous Mind that helped me frame a lot of these “discussions” as fundamental personality clashes. Haidt’s breakdown of Moral Foundations Theory and showing how it correlates to political stances has helped me not get caught up in these disagreements; either as a participant or an observer.

Neither side is thinking. Neither side is “following the science” or the data or the facts or whatever they claim. For the majority of us, one mode of being “felt right”, and we’re following that. What is that feeling? Where did it come from? Have you considered that the person across the aisle had the exact same feeling, but with a different outcome?

That’s the power of this book. It helped me reconcile the notion that people can have diametrically opposed ideas on a subject and both be right(ish). Moreover, it helps me see the person behind the argument. Which, once we get there, I think leads to healthier, more productive discussions. Until we can start humanizing “the other side” again, we’ve already lost. All of us.

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There you have it! A year in books - and one hell of a year at that.

I intend for this to be a companion piece to a more general “Year in Review” I plan on writing Soon^TM. I wanted to take a step back and see how much reading I got done in 2021, and write a bit of a time capsule to my future self. I knew when I first committed to writing “reviews” that I wouldn’t write one for every book, so it’s also nice to give myself some space to jot down a few notes on the less notable parts of my literary adventure.

26 books in 12 months. Not bad.

What is your neighbour’s name?

I’ve lived where I have for over three years. I’ve spoken to my one neighbour a handful of times; I know he works as a welder, and I could describe him to you physically. I know he has family in South America. I know which car in the parking lot is his, and that he works an early shift that means that sometimes I can hear the shower running at 4AM through the walls.

But I don’t know his name. I think he told me it early on in our correspondence, but he has a somewhat thick accent and I was too embarrassed to ask him to repeat himself. Besides, what does it matter? I don’t need to know his name to have perfectly adequate smalltalk about the weather or my new dog or the shrub that hangs over our shared fence.

Except, maybe it does matter. Maybe it’s crucially important that I know his name. That I know all my neighbours’ names. One of the driving messages in Tribe is that modern society is terrible for the people that live in it. So much so that we are falling apart mentally and scrambling to re-establish a sense of community wherever we can find it because these concepts are rooted so deeply in our psyche that living without them is torture.

If I average out the amount of time I have spent in physical proximity to every person I knew, and ranked them from most to least, my neighbour would probably break the top 20. He might also be the one person on the list without a name.

Junger makes the comparison of modern society to a tribe in Africa called the !Kung. He describes their lifestyle as rather hard compared to ours, where members would die more frequently from accidents and diseases that we in modern society have been insulated from. But he also mentions how the tribe lives communally. They share resources, they share their work, they share their lives with a modest (50 was the number I believe he gave) handful of people, some of whom are relatives, all of whom are around you nearly 24/7.

You think they know their neighbours’ names?

This analogy warrants exploration because modern society has not yet “sunk in” to us on a biological level (Junger argues that it takes ~25 000 years for changes in lifestyle to show up in the gene pool, and we started the whole agrarian lifestyle thing about 10 000 years ago). Put another way in a quote I heard: “we are modern software running on millennia old hardware”. We weren’t built for modern society on a fundamental level.

What are we missing? I’d like to think the benefits of modern society are self-apparent (plenty of food, modern medicine, social welfare programs, safety at a level unimaginable to people even 200 hundred years ago). Why is it then that our collective mental health seems to be in free-fall? Junger raises an interesting possible explanation:

How do you become an adult in a society that doesn’t ask for sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesn’t require courage?

When did you become an adult? Do you even consider yourself “an adult”? I think, retrospectively, a lot of people would say things like “when I got married”, or “when I had my first kid”, or “in my twenties”. Maybe these answers are all true. But I wonder how many people went in to these proactively with the thought “Today, I will become an adult”.

I’m brought back to the stories we hear about how Sparta treated its children. I think it’s in the movie 300 where the future king Leonidas was thrown in to the wilderness with barely the clothes on his back and had to kill a wolf and skin it to survive. When he came back to Sparta, do you think there was any doubt in his mind as to whether or not he was a man?

I’m not suggesting we send our kids in to the woods to start fighting wolves again. But I do think the lack of a demarcation point is trying on the human mind. It’s hard on society too, because we lack a common language to describe how one becomes an adult, and we lose part of our identity as the “group who has all, to a man, done X hard thing”. Shared hardship is another point that Junger argues is sorely lacking in modern society, to the detriment of all.

I think the hardest thing I’ve ever done is get my Bachelor’s degree. It required sustained effort over four years, and lots of kinds of sacrifice to achieve my goal. But, I don’t think getting my degree made me an adult. In my youth, I thought it was like a checklist: if I do all the things an Adult does, I will, by definition, be an Adult. At time of writing, I have done or am doing many things I thought would make me an Adult - but I don’t feel like one.

A content creator I admire sometimes references an adulthood initiation rite that he underwent years ago. It stands out partially because the rite and his outward mannerisms are at odds: his name is Chris, and he’s a white guy in his thirties that is in to gaming. But then he mentions a Mayan initiation rite performed partially by a Shaman out of South America and it stands out due to the intense juxtaposition.

I’ve been thinking about it because it’s a marker that he can confidently point to and say “that was when I became a man”. It’s something he went in to with his eyes open, with the express intent of transforming himself.

I think this is something that we are missing from modern society, which I attribute partly to the more globalised nature of the world. Cultures and religions used to be chock-full of (admittedly often arbitrary) markers that one could point to as the changing of an epoch in one’s life. Baptism. Marriage. Time in the army (often mandatory for men of a certain age). Having kids. Your kids having kids. And I think they were more significant because unlike say, high-school, not everyone survived every epoch transition.

Our no-one-left-behind policy, while great for accessibility and the group as a whole, strips meaning from the event for the individual. It’s the blue-ribbon “participation trophy” problem that is so often lampooned. “If everyone’s super, no one is”.

Aside from my bachelor’s degree, there is one other experience I have gone through that I would fit roughly in to this category of “transformational”. I didn’t think of it as such when I signed up, but looking back, the trip definitely changed me, and for the better I think.

It was called “!explore”, and it was a youth program that I was introduced to through my church. You had to be referred, and the program selected ~10 applicants from Canada and the US to travel to Indiana and live at a seminary for three weeks. The intent was for the program to be a “junior ministry” training camp of a sort, where churches could send the more heavily involved teens to see if ministry would be a path they would be interested in pursuing.

So, at 18, I went to the States and joined a tribe. We ate communally, lived in shared accommodations (separated by gender), volunteered for the benefit of the community in soup kitchens and bike repair shops and even one Habitat for Humanity project where I helped pour the foundation. We were led by a shaman and a group of elders (okay they were ministers and the “elders” were in their thirties but I’m trying to draw an analogy here) through sessions where we explored the nuts and bolts of ministry, and our own faith foundations. At the end of the three weeks we retreated to a camp in the woods and spent the last couple days reflecting both as individuals and as a group. Most of us cried at some point. I sure did.

I’ve thought about this trip infrequently over the last decade or so since it happened, and every time I do it sounds more surreal and magical. It was three weeks. We were your typical aloof teenagers. How did this program break through so much cultural programming to affect us so strongly?

I wish I could say we all kept in touch and there was a fairytale ending in there where two of us went on to get married, but that isn’t the case. Most of us lost touch the moment we all left. I have most of them on Facebook still, but we don’t keep up. I think modern society moved back in to our brains and destroyed the tribe we had started to build.

Even if it was short-lived, I think the return to tribal life had an effect on me. I thought for a long time that the reason this trip was transformational was because it was the catalyst for my falling out with the institution of the church. After reading Tribe, I wonder if the act of community living was the more profound impact. It gave me an alternate experience to the current average mode of being in society, something to contrast daily living with. I think I miss it. I think many of us miss it, deep in our genes.

A significant part of the book also concerns itself with war, and why veterans seem to be having a harder and harder time re-integrating with society over the generations. A couple of Junger’s anecdotes are about soldiers missing the war when they return home. He highlights that they miss the cooperation of military service, and the lack of competition within your unit. He argues that PTSD stems from re-integration with society, not from the trauma of war itself.

He contrasts soldiers from modern societies with those from societies like the !Kung. If we think about the experience of re-integration, it would be much easier in a tribe than in a city. You know everyone, and everyone knows that you have sacrificed heavily for their personal safety. They know the ones who didn’t come back. Maybe you have generations of familial friendship between your family and the family of a fellow soldier who died in your arms. They would be understanding. They would grieve with you.

Compare that to the experience of “coming home” to a city in the West. Your immediate family and friends are empathetic to a certain extent, but the enemy was never “at the gates” (at least not in the last ~50 years). If you successfully land a job, I doubt there would be as much latitude given to you as there would be to your tribal counterpart. Maybe there are even people on staff who are against “The War”. And the people in your community, where you live? They don’t even know your name.

How can we expect people to not start losing their sanity when confronted with the horrific banality and detachment? Friends complain about traffic and gossip about celebrities. A year ago you weren’t certain you would survive the night. There is no shared experience. From the book:

If war were purely and absolutely bad in every single aspect and toxic in all its effects, it would probably not happen as often as it does

I recognize this is now the second time I’ve advocated for violence as a necessary part of life. I’ll state unequivocally I do not believe that’s the case. However, there is something we seem to have lost in modern society that war provides. In my heart, I’m a pacifist, and I believe that any conflict that devolves to violence is one where both sides have lost.

I wonder if there is some core element of the nature of war that we can extract that would help us return to our more tribal nature while simultaneously not having to base that element on killing. The best analog I can think of is the Olympics: groups of peoples get together to compete for supremacy with other groups. We rally behind our soldiers. We require our soldiers to sacrifice their time and energy for the benefit of the group (and, to an extent, to the soldier themself). The group also supports this individual, both before and after the “war”.

I don’t think the Olympics is the answer, but I do think it provides an interesting model for a non-lethal warfare analog. Maybe it can be scaled down to a city versus city or community versus community level, too. I’m starting to pull a bit from The Righteous Mind now, too, but another aspect that helps bind a group together is the identification of an enemy, or other. Some non-lethal way for groups to engage in spirited competition against an “other” would, from what I can tell, probably be a net benefit to the people.

Of course, we would have to abolish the participation trophy. I haven’t looked in to it, but my hunch is that coming in last place is better for an individual in the long-term than getting a participation trophy.

I also don’t think this is a radical idea, because I’ve basically described varsity sports, or even Scouts-style youth groups. My suggestion would be to make the competition more intense, and to require all people to go through at least one of these groups and engage in this soldier-like existence before a certain age. In a world of helicopter parenting, I think this is a hard sell. But it might also be necessary.

I don’t think globalisation is inherently bad, and I am certainly happy for the benefits of modern society. Given my physical ability, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have survived as a soldier of the !Kung. But, as Junger argues, I think we’ve also lost something. We’ve bought physical security at the price of our tribal identity. Who am I? What do I stand for? What are my values? In modern society, I think these answers are harder to come by, if the questions are even asked. To give the Junger the final word:

What would you risk dying for - and for whom - is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves

I like to classify the books I read in to three categories: Great Fiction (1984, Atlas Shrugged, Dune), Great Non-Fiction (Outliers, The Righteous Mind, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), and a third category I don’t have a good name for. The following review pertains to a book of the third category.

This third category is made up of books that, I believe, are written and read in earnest, though by a section of the population I do not normally associate with. I relate to these books like outsider art, a glimpse in to a world that the literary mainstream does not acknowledge often. They concerns themselves with conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, ancient aliens, that sort of thing.

I think it’s important and healthy to engage with these works. It helps broaden my perspective and helps me relate to people who I believe are falling through the cracks of modern society; some of whom are close friends or loved ones. Reading these books helps me live in their world for a little while, and helps build empathy across an ever-widening gap between “us” and “the other”. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

First, I want to tell you about this funny little book about the Pyramids.

The central thesis of The Orion Mystery revolves around the Memphis necropolis, which for simplicity sake can be thought of as “the place where all the cool, super old stuff in Egypt is”. The author proposes that Ancient Egypt had a more pronounced stellar cult (a religion based on the stars) than Egyptology at the time of their writing recognized, instead of the solar cult (a religion based on the sun) contemporary Egyptology often attributed findings to. This thesis is based on the placement of the pyramids, which corresponds conspicuously with the Orion constellation (hence the title), among other supporting evidence that the stars were pivotal to the society of Ancient Egypt.

I want to pause for a moment to qualify what I mean by “Ancient Egypt” in this context. It’s easy to conflate the Ancient Egypt that built the pyramids with, say, Egypt of the Roman Empire era - but these two cultures are millennia apart. I once read that Cleopatra lived closer to the creation of the iPhone than the Great Pyramid, which helps put the time period we’re discussing in to perspective. Similarly, if we anchor our mental timeline on the probable lifetime of one of the other well-known Egyptian rulers, Tutankhamen, we’re still short by over 1000 years. It’s easy to forget how ancient “Ancient Egypt” is, which for our purposes is ~4500 years ago.

I highlight the time that has elapsed from the creation of the pyramids to our modern day to give the benefit of the doubt to some of the theories proposed in this book. It’s important to remember that, what might seem ridiculous to a modern mind, could have been truth to someone living in Ancient Egypt. So the proposition that massive stone structures were built by a culture that didn’t have sandwiches to align with tiny lights in the night sky cannot be dismissed out of hand. I state all this because, without at least accepting plausibility, this whole analysis falls apart.

Aside from the admittedly simple observation that the pyramids do look like they correspond to Orion’s belt when viewed from above, in both orientation and size, the author has several other supporting pieces of evidence. A good amount of the book focuses on the Egyptian religion and direct references in ancient sources that relate Gods to particular stellar concepts: Osiris-Orion and Isis-Sirius are two good examples. The author makes a compelling argument that some of the religious stories were actually predicated on the movement of stars across the heavens, based on which Gods mapped to which stars and how those stars would have appeared to move to the Ancient Egyptians (don’t even get me started on precession).

However, I have also heard a compelling argument made that the pivotal stories of the Ancient Egyptian religion (those that involve Osiris/Isis/Horus/Seth, the scattering of Osiris’ body, Horus’ fight with Seth, and Horus losing his eye) are the same moral teachings found in every world religion. The professor making this argument then traced the evolution of this teaching through to Christianity, which, as I am familiar with it, was convincing.

I’ll say it again: it’s hard to interpret what we humans meant 4500 years ago. It’s possible both of these parties are somewhat correct. But it also makes me think that both parties may have been seeing what they wanted to see in the ancient religious texts that fit whatever narrative they personally were working on. A sort of historical Rorschach test.

Admittedly, a lot of the “Gods related to the stars” analysis started to get away from me by the end. I am by no means an expert on Egypt; I’ve been exposed to the same zeitgeist interpretation as most of us. The part that was easier to follow was the author’s supposition that the Egyptian’s obsession with the stars was predicated on the Benben stone.

From what I could gather, the Benben stone was partly a mythical artifact from the Egyptian creation myth, and also probably a meteorite that landed in Egypt. I can imagine a meteorite screaming down from the night sky being impressive enough to push a society over the edge from “stars are neat” to “all hail Orion lord of the stars!” The author suggests that the Benben stone was a conical meteorite, and that it related to the mythical Egyptian phoenix (again, this sort of got away from me), which lent it religious significance, and was another link between the stars and pyramid-shaped things.

The last piece of evidence I’ll touch on is how the author extended the observation that three of the pyramids seemed to reflect the structure of Orion’s belt to the idea that the whole Memphis necropolis was a reflection of the night sky. They related the Nile to the Milky way, drawing parallels to other pyramids based on these two anchor points.

I bring this point up because it’s a theme I see play out in lots of these “third category” books I read: the idea of the Master Plan. These kinds of books can’t seem to help themselves. No matter how disparate their theories, they go full “Always Sunny in Philadelphia Pepe Silvia” levels of convinced that it’s all part of the plan.

Which I find odd as a phenomena. To give some other examples, I’ve read a book of this kind about the Mayan calendar (the one that was supposedly predicting the end of the world in 2012) and one about ancient civilizations across the continents. Both concluded with a Master Plan chapter or two where they alleged that someone had some plan, and that “we” were having the wool pulled over our eyes. It’s consistent enough that I believe it to be a feature of these categories of books, not a coincidence (oh no now I’m doing it, too).

To jump ahead a bit, I base my claim that it’s a feature on the kind of person I think these books are written for (and by). There’s a personality type that wants to believe that there is Order in the world, be that in the form of shadow governments or aliens or lizard people. The idea of a plan, any plan, is comforting to someone who thrives on consistency and rules. It’s this reconciliation of (what I believe to be) the inherent chaos and entropy of the universe with a predisposition to law and order that creates these kinds of works, and the people who buy them.

If there is a Master Plan, then there is a reason your father/mother/sister/brother/cousin/best friend died/became an alcoholic/developed a mental illness/insert tragedy here. It wasn’t random. Because if it’s random, it could happen to anyone, even you, and that’s fucking terrifying.

But, if you know the secret Master Plan, maybe you can save everyone. Maybe you can save yourself.

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I’m certain I’ve already let on to my opinion of these kinds of books, but to state it plainly: I think they’re flawed. I balance this against the respect I have for anyone who can successfully get a book published, and the doubtless countless hours of research and thinking that goes in to writing any book worth reading. Which is why I don’t want to flatly label them as “bad”. I want to explore now why I think they’re flawed, and hopefully articulate what people might feel when they experience these kinds of works (either in audio, video, or written formats), but can’t place their finger on why they feel that way.

I couldn’t tell you when or how this happened, but intelligence is now in vogue. Specifically, intelligence as it’s measured by schools (the distinction of which is a whole other topic I’m not going to get in to right now). The problem with that being that not everyone is good at school. In fact, I’d say the majority of people do not excel in their academic careers, which has created and is creating countless problems for the education systems of different countries and society as a whole.

Academic success aside, there used to be more of a balance where the “nerdy” kids were re-assured with daytime specials telling them their time will come, whereas the “dumb jocks” were shown as living it up in school but having the rest of their life be mediocre. With this change of having intelligence be the sole determiner of social success both during and after your school career, people who struggled in school were destined to a lifetime as an outsider.

But what if the nerds were wrong?

I think these kinds of books (okay I just need to give them a name: let’s go with Speculative Non-Fiction) appeal to this outsider group who struggled through school both socially and academically (now that those two skill-sets have effectively become one). My first assumption about the popularity of these Speculative Non-Fiction books is that they treat “the establishment” as the outsider. They start asking questions like: What if all those people who gave you C’s and D’s were backed by institutions who were wrong? What if all the peers that shunned you are wasting their time with academia? What if the tables were turned, and you knew things they didn’t?

The Orion Mystery spends a good amount of time at the beginning to establish that there are competing theories about different aspects of Ancient Egypt, and that “the experts” don’t have all the answers. This dovetails in to a well-deserved point that, if there are competing ideas in the space, maybe the pyramids could have been built to align to the stars. I mentioned before that when we try and infer the intentions of humans from over four millennia ago, it can get a little hazy.

The irony of Speculative Non-Fiction books pointing out that the mainstream thought of a particular discipline is built on human understanding and is therefore fallible, to then turn right around and propose another theory built on human understanding, without at least glimpsing in the mirror, is what frustrates me. I do think it’s reasonable that you don’t spend the entirety of your own book contradicting yourself. However, the author should at least acknowledge that they are as fallible if not more so than other thinkers in their field.

Why more so? Because fringe/alternative theories to the mainstream do not have the benefit of collective critique. The more broadly known an idea is, the more opportunity there exists for someone to come along and poke holes in it. This doesn’t always happen, and there are cases where a field endlessly defers judgement to another colleague, to the point where it’s wholly the opinion of a small handful that craft the broader narrative, but I digress.

The phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” comes to mind. From my experience with Speculative Non-Fiction, the authors tend to hone in on outlier (or should I say outsider) data points, and craft a narrative around those data points, dismissing the rest of the data. This is where the philosophy of these books starts to fall apart. These books often feel like they arrive at a certain conclusion (the pyramids were built to align to the stars), and then work backwards collecting evidence that supports this theory. This is the opposite direction you want scientific thought to move in.

Often there are competing theories in any given discipline because academics are working with an incomplete set of puzzle pieces, and are trying to see the whole. These books grab a couple pieces, decide they have figured out what the whole is, and then start placing other pieces down in ways that support this view. Compounded by the fact that we will never have all the puzzle pieces, these works can flourish because they are compelling. Great stories can be written by starting at the conclusion and working your way backwards to the beginning, giving an author opportunity to weave foreshadowing and hints in to their narrative to reinforce the story.

But science isn’t a story. Sometimes the truth is boring.

Boring doesn’t sell well, though. So the most popular Speculative Non-Fiction books end up being overly dramatized, weaving traditional story-telling elements in to what is often at least positioned as an academic work. One element I’ve noticed that is rather popular is to weave an air of mystery in to the work.

I’ve often found that these books advertise themselves as having unlocked “secret knowledge” of one kind or another, and that by reading this book, you can join their secret club (see above about the outsider status of the author and audience and why that might be appealing). There’s also an almost tribal element to it, as they use phrases like “passed down” to lend a sense of kinship between author, audience, and subject. I can imagine that sense of greater connection would be powerful to someone who was a perpetual outsider.

We can take this one step further. When you bring in the context that most of these books have where the “insider” knowledge is of questionable veracity, we can start justifying that it’s good to be uneducated. By casting doubt on “mainstream” thought in general, and putting in its place this secret knowledge that only you, the inquisitive mind, seek out, you can justify poor academic/social performance. Not because of a poorly built system (which is what I personally believe is the problem), but because the fundamental knowledge blocks the system is built on top of are wrong.

Now these books aren’t simply teaching you something new (that only you and a select special few were curious enough to seek out), they are also fixing a potentially painful part of your personal history. They let you step out of the mainstream and look at it as one might look at a group of children playing a game of make-believe. “Ah, the innocence of youth,” you might say to yourself.

I don’t think any one book does this intentionally. I think most people slip, little by little, out of society and (somewhat ironically) in to a world of make-believe. Almost all Speculative Non-Fiction reinforces this thought pattern, as do the communities that form around it. Taken as a whole, they present an exciting, welcoming alternative to a system that is failing people on the academic margins.

I’ll acknowledge right now that this could start to sound about as conspiratorial as one of these books. I don’t mean to imply that any of this is deliberate. I think it’s a subculture that has gained popularity over the last couple decades due in part to social success now being tied to academic success in early life. “Light” versions of these books start coming out in the 80’s and 90’s, with harmless propositions about the pyramids, but it leads inexorably to anti-vaxxers and Q-Anon.

Because it’s right to be wrong.

But why should you care? If you’re not taken in by these books or these lines of thinking, what harm do they do in merely existing? More over, what can one person do to pull people out of a subculture they have willingly submitted to?

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, one of the problems that Pirsig raised that stuck with me was the problem with hypotheses. As I understood it, his problem was that people have limited time and limited resources, but there are infinite hypotheses one could propose to be an explanation of a particular phenomenon. How do you choose which hypotheses to pursue? Which do you choose?

In Speculative Non-Fiction, the audience and the author are often defined as being part of the same out-group, either implicitly or explicitly. They define the out-group loosely as “not the in-group; the outsiders”. But there are infinite properties a group does not have. Which do you choose?

My problem with this definition the subculture often leans in to is that it’s infinitely malleable. The subculture has no defined characteristics of its own, only that it’s not part of the mainstream (whatever that means; we established that there are often competing ideas in any discipline). Which means if some interest wanted to point the subculture in a particular direction (or a small part of the subculture), all it needs to do is declare that “the mainstream” does not approve of or accept it.

Vaccines. Election results. Pyramid placements. Take your pick.

I read Speculative Non-Fiction to try and glimpse the world people of this subculture inhabit. I want to know what they’re talking about; what they’re thinking about. I want to know them. I think that’s how you pull someone back in who has joined this anti-mainstream faction. We stop dismissing the people out-of-hand - they’re used to it. In fact, being dismissed by someone in the mainstream only further reinforces these narratives. We need to engage with them on their turf. Maybe you can walk them back from the harmful stuff to just the silly stuff.

We’re all just looking for a place to call home.

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.

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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.

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.

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This book breaks my heart. On the one hand, this feels like the beginning of a distinct arc that takes us up to the end of Changes, and Changes is my favourite entry in the series. On the other hand, the antagonists in this book do nothing for me.

These reviews have been helpful for me to remember more information about each book, and given me the opportunity to reflect on the themes, ideas, and characters that resonate with me. In doing so, I’ve realized that the Kemmlerites do actually matter and show up more in the series, which was my annoyance with this book in my initial read through. Although I don’t blame Butcher at all for not carrying every character/villain forward in the series, I always count it as a plus when we get to see characters re-appear in later instalments.

Although, I do deduct points that the re-appearance of the Kemmlerites in later books made almost no impression on my memory. The most egregious example of this is Grevane, who for my money is the most interesting Kemmlerite, but gets abandoned after this book. Ho hum.

It’s possible that my affinity for Grevane is solely the aura from my actual favourite antagonist splashing up against him: Liver Spots.

AKA Quintus Cassius. I will be forever sad that the climax of this book was supposed to be a fight with the Kemmlerites and their armies of the undead, but the much more tense scene is when Cassius is torturing Harry in the museum. I love this character because he feels so real and is pathologically, murderously obsessed with revenge against Dresden for losing him his coin.

Which, given the character, is a great reason to want to kill Harry. Cassius being left broken and bleeding at the end of Death Masks gives him a solid motive for wanting to come after Dresden - and to make it hurt. It also shows us that there are repercussions in this universe to Harry’s anger, which is a terrific character flaw that helps him feel grounded and real.

Cassius also being a former Denarian, and having his power forcibly removed from him after lifetimes of wielding a coin lets us know he is capable of terrible violence. With all these elements set up, the scene where Cassius has Dresden “right where he wants him” and then starts cutting in to him is so refreshing as opposed to tropey monologuing. It feels grounded and real, and lends credibility to a universe where a wizard rides a zombie dinosaur through Chicago on Halloween. It’s too bad that most of this is happening in the background of a conflict with a couple of cardboard cut-out necromancers.

I wonder if the book would be better if Jim picked one Kemmlerite pairing to focus on, and we got to spend more time fighting with them and exploring their powers instead of getting like one fight scene with each pair. Cowl & Kumori are interesting as straight-up powerful dark wizards, with us seeing Dresden drop a car on Cowl and it barely phasing him, and Kumori having some grey morality where she saves some random passer-by from death. Corpsetaker’s body-swapping is inherently interesting and could have gone some interesting directions, and I’ve already expressed my love for Grevane & Cassius. Not to mention Grevane seemed to be the most competent, and had his cool zombie army that breaks in to Dresden’s apartment.

But no, instead we get spare samplings of each pairing. Even Corpsetaker’s big moment where she swaps with Luccio and Dresden has to have that lightning realization and shoot Luccio’s body happens too fast. It falls flat that we get to see Corpsetaker’s version of The People’s Elbow and seconds later see her get popped in the head. I would have liked to have one or two smaller instances of Corpsetaker using their power earlier in the book to build up the hype, like for instance a client that comes to Dresden saying “help someone is in my body, I’m not whoever this person is!” and have that be the inciting incident that drags Dresden in to conflict with the Kemmlerites.

Which is another criticism I have of the antagonists in this book. My personal main villain, Cassius, actually holds third in the villain hierarchy plot-wise. First is the Kemmlerites, but second is Mavra of all people (people in heavy air-quotes).

She also feels totally unnecessary to make this plot work. She pushes Dresden across the threshold for this quest, but he would have gotten swept up in it with his connection to Butters anyway. Grevane attacked Butters when Harry happened to be there, and knowing Harry, he would have gotten swept up in the Darkhallow plot, with or without Mavra’s intervention.

Which, hold on, let’s talk about Butters for a minute.

I appreciate Butters getting added to Dresden’s Army because it unlocks Harry to keep growing in power while leaving a purely vanilla, non ass-kicking member around for the reader to identify with. While I love adventuring with Murphy/Michael/Thomas/Billy Borden, they are all fighters. Butters throwing up from fear while the zombies attack and having “Polka will never die!” shouted at him is so endearing, and is probably how most of us would respond to the spectacular and terrifying world Dresden occupies.

Butters is also another one of these characters who are “half-and-half”. I’m classifying him along with the Changelings (half-fae) and Kincaid (half-whatever-he-is) as someone who is “half-science”. The other half-and-half folks are part magic part muggle, but Butters is coming at it from the other side in my mind; he’s half muggle and half whatever the opposite of magic is (in this case I’m calling it science as a catch-all). He seems to be even further in to the “magic can’t be real” camp than a couple of the other vanilla folks we’ve met, so much so that he comes up with scientific theories to explain why Harry can heal himself so well, or why wizards mess with electronics.

Which is fun to watch as Butters begins to accept the spooky side of the block over the course of the series. He gets more and more wrapped up in Harry’s life due to his functional nature as the one healer that Harry can rely on (and gives us some great Bonesian moments of “Dammit Dresden I’m a medical examiner not a doctor!”) At this point in the series, most of us have bought in to the world so hard that we lose that aspect of wonder. Butters is a great way for us to recontextualize what is happening to Harry daily is, in fact, not normal.

Speaking of weird circumstances that Harry often finds himself in: enter Lash.

I’m probably biased due to my unashamed love for all things Denarian, but Lash’s concept is so interesting to me. I appreciate the fact that she’s framed more as a “shadow” or “the footprint you leave in wet sand on a beach” as opposed to being the full-blown aspect of the Fallen Angel Lasciel. I mean, Harry’s strong and all, but it would be ridiculous for him to contend with a being that is older than time itself. Making Lash a scaled down version of the full blown Fallen gives the story credibility when Harry contends with her will (and wins).

Her introduction is also a lot of fun, playing around with the unreliable narrator. There’s this lesser known movie called “Thr3e” that I enjoy (though I am not known for having good taste in movies, so take that as you will), and, without giving too much away, Lash only being “real” to Harry hits similar notes. I would have loved to have some sort of visual reference for what Butters must have seen when he walked in on Dresden and “Sheila” in “her apartment”, which I imagine pushed Butters further in to the belief that magic isn’t real, and that Harry is mental.

Lash also gives Harry an interesting take on the nature of the Fallen and how they might not be as different from him as he wants to believe. She gives an allegory about how the Fallen didn’t want to live under what they believed to be an old, foolish, oppressive regime, and that they instead wanted to strike out on their own, in an attempt to be better than what they left behind. She then relates that to Harry’s own tumultuous relationship with the White Council, saying he of all people should be able to understand why the Fallen did what they did.

I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy when Butcher has Harry get self-reflective about his values, for instance his relationship to magic in contrast to Michael’s relationship to the divine. Having the Fallen throw this angle at Harry is another piece of evidence that the world is a lot greyer than a younger Harry may have believed.

I think a lot of great moments that come from the Dresden Files are when Harry confronts the monster within, and one of his biggest personal demons is the constant allure of using his power for himself. His joining up with Lash and her insinuation that he and the Fallen may not be so different is a double-whammy: it compromises some of his moral ground by equating his actions to those of Fallen angels, and gives him access to a tempting well of power (as if his current allotment of power was not temptation enough).

Harry’s struggle against the influence of Lash is one of my more favourite mini-arcs because we get to have a quasi-Denarian around full time. Pair that up with Mouse now joining Harry on missions in the field (who doesn’t like dogs?) and Thomas moving in with Harry, and the Lash arc represents a great slice of the series. We’re through the “powering up” phase and can move in to the “fighting bigger and badder threats” phase with pick-and-mix parties from Dresden’s Army. All the while, Harry has this constant drum beat in his ear:

“Take the coin, use the power for good, you’re stronger than all the others who have come before…”

“Take the coin…”

“Take the coin…”

“Take the coin…”

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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I love the Fae.

I find the stories that involve them so fun, the Fae feel unpredictable and yet wholly consistent. I find it interesting that some of the High Court Fae have tremendous power, yet are also bound by some sort of metaphysical laws that forbids them from outright subjugating mankind.

Between their inability to lie, their inability to interfere with mortals directly (though Harry makes the analogy that they could drop you in the middle of a deadly forest in the Nevernever and technically they wouldn’t have killed you, the forest would have), and their obsession with bargains, they make interesting fradversaries to Dresden. They end up being like the White Court in my mind, having a sort of gray morality/amorality that makes them difficult to classify as monsters most of the time (though I’m sure Harry would disagree).

Now, let’s talk about some of the Fae.

Mab! What an entrance. As the series goes on, she feels a lot more like the “wicked faerie godmother” we’re told Lea was. It often feels like while she will help keep Harry alive, it’s just barely most of the time, and while it’s expedient to her. She exemplifies what I meant by the amorality of the Sidhe. She isn’t protecting Harry’s life because life itself in innately valuable, she’s protecting him because he’s still useful to her. Her aesthetic is also fantastic, “The Queen of Air and Darkness” and ruler of the winter court is a great mirror to the cold ruthlessness of her character.

And then there’s her daughter, Maeve. I think the initial books in the series suffer a bit from being a little too heavy on the pulp and Maeve at her worst exemplifies this. One could argue that we’re seeing the world through Harry’s filter, and his views of women are a…mixed bag. At her best though, she does feel like a young Mab. Ruthless and manipulative to the point of near insanity, until you remember the amorality of the Fae make this behaviour entirely consistent. Which, again, in my mind makes them a great set of characters. You’re able to have characters like Maeve who are almost cartoonishly evil at times, but it’s due to her nature, which keeps the world believable while still having wild characters.

While I do dig the Fae, the rest of the characters introduced in this book are pretty meh, except for the odd one that sticks around post-Summer Knight. Most of the Summer Court we meet (who are effectively the villains of this book) are unremarkable. Aurora and her entourage (which, aside, skip past cartoonishly evil and right into “leaving the hero alone in a room and assuming he died” levels of stupid. The whole scene where a guy rooting through the dead summer knight’s personal effects is actually Grum who was actually Lord Talos feels like a stretch. Ditto to Korrick as the unicorn. Anyway…) are underwhelming. Perhaps they’re tame in contrast to Maeve and Mab so they’re overshadowed when placed alongside them. Fix and Aurora end up growing into their roles in pretty rewarding ways, so that’s nice, but in the context of this book, they’re okay.

On the other side of the board we have the White Council. It’s nice to get some exposure to the White Council beyond the thug Morgan, and also helps colour in the world of the Butcher-verse more broadly. Generally the Council feels underwhelming and toothless compared to the Fae High Courts, but it’s possible Dresden as storyteller colours this interpretation. The Merlin exemplifies this; we’re told he’s super powerful but we almost never see it, kinda like the Council itself. It seems like bureaucracy most of the time (unless they’re meting out punishments for breaking the Laws).

They do offer a good check on Dresden’s power via the Laws, though. One of the recurring themes of good heroes (in my estimation) is that they have a code. The Laws are what separate Dresden from the monsters. It also adds to his character when he follows the Laws to the point of his own death, even though he is on the outs with the Council most of the time. It gives him a great excuse to flaunt the Laws should it suit him, but his integrity will not let him do it.

The Senior Council has a couple of notable exceptions of this toothlessness, namely Ebenezar McCoy. We don’t get a ton of insight into Ebenzar’s character this book but his importance certainly ramps up as the series goes on. It also helps us as the reader understand more of Harry’s views as his relationship with his mentor unfolds before us. Specifically, Harry’s view on the source of magic being “life itself” (and all the interesting problems the Blackstaff reveal causes in that department).

I’ve been talking about the characters and their development a lot because the plot of this book is kinda meh. Which is a shame, because, as I mentioned, I love the stories about the Fae. It feels like this plot could have been more interesting, but it had some of the same problems Fool Moon did; there was a little too much going on plot-wise for anything to stick. The idea that one of the scions of a house that controls a god-damn season has decided that Mutually Assured Destruction is a good idea has a lot of potential, but for whatever reason Butcher has this bad habit of layering in a couple extra plot-lines in the initial Dresden Files that muddy up the core concept.

For instance, there’s this whole sub-plot involving “the Tigress” who is some ghoul-assassin who feels unnecessary. In my review of Grave Peril I mention that you probably have a better book if you cut out the entire Kravos character - I think similarly you can cut out Tigress (and Ace for the ~10 pages of time he gets) and have a better story. In my previous review, my criticism of an overloaded plot is a problem for me because I’m trying to keep a bunch of fantasy-magic crap straight in my head. If I’m also trying to keep straight a lot of clues on the detective angle, it gets to be too much. Even though it ends up being a “magic” sub-plot (it’s a ghoul and a changeling trying to off Harry), they’re trying to cause mortal problems i.e. killing him with guns, and it’s not obvious most of the time we’re dealing with this sub-plot that it’s a magical problem.

The plot gets near the ridiculous with the Talos/Korrick reveals near the end of the book. I have a problem with universes where you can have 100% imitation. In this book, we have this long reveal chain of this unnamed brute character who was rooting around the previous Summer Knight’s effects, who “revealed” himself to be an ogre named Grum, who then reveals himself to actually be Talos of the Summer Court. It feels Scooby-Dooesque and in my mind can ruin a universe if you have characters who can appear as a perfect copy of another character, as you can get to these chains of fleshmask reveals that are absurd. I give this a minor pass because Talos isn’t imitating an existing character in Grum, he is instead wearing a perfect disguise that Dresden can’t pick up on when he later meets the true persona of Talos.

I think the last major element of this story is the introduction of Elaine. It felt a little obvious and clichéd when Harry and Bob would bandy back and forth about Elaine’s “death” in the fire but “oh they never found the body” and then woah wow she’s actually alive who would have thought?!?

That aside, Elaine and Harry is a bright spot in this book. The easy route in my mind is to bring her back as a love interest as Susan is now out of the picture and go with the trite summer love/old flame dichotomy that ends with “oh but we’re different people now but I’ll always love you X”. Elaine feels like her own person who has grown and made choices since that fateful day, and I enjoy that the romance is basically quashed right away. It shakes up the formula enough that I don’t know where this relationship will go which is exciting (granted it hasn’t materialized into anything thus-far but in the context of this book it feels like there is opportunity there).

Oh, and I have to call this out. The whole “chlorofiend” gag is great. High mark of this book in my mind.

The plant monster - No, wait. I couldn’t possibly refer to that thing as a “plant monster.” I’d be a laughstock.

later…

“What is it?” “Chlorofiend,” I said. “A what?” “Plant monster.” “Oh, right.”

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.

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I think my favourite part of the Dresden files is being able to empathize with Harry: constantly out of his depth in a crazy world full of wonder and danger. Grave Peril really starts pulling in the wider Butcherverse of magical entities. Up until this point we’ve dealt with “vanilla humans” using (and abusing) magic with minimal intervention from the denizens of the Nevernever. Grave Peril feels like this is our first foray into a “proper” Dresden Files novel, where we’re accompanying Harry as he battles forces way out of his depth on the wizard version of a shoestring budget.

Although it’s what I would call the first proper Dresden Files novel, its one of the weakest in the category. I learned that the first three novels were written as a sort of “pack”, and that there was a bit of a gap between Butcher writing this book and the next one (Summer Knight). I think this explains two of my major problems with this book: herrings and hormones.

My main gripe with Grave Peril is that the plot has way too many baits. I’ll start by acknowledging that a mystery novel needs some mystery by definition. I think the problems come in when Butcher applies the mystery to his particular flavour of fantasy. Future novels do a better job of weaving the investigative persona of Dresden with the wizard persona by making the fantasy elements much more straight-forward and leaving the mystery to the vanilla humans.

The reader is already trying to grapple with the metaphysics of Butcher’s fantasy, and I think it detracts from the enjoyment of the story if we’re trying to sort through the “real” fantasy facts we have from the “fake” fantasy facts. The biggest offender here is Dresden trying to figure who (or what) The Nightmare is.

I don’t know how Ghosts work.

I don’t know how Black Magic works.

I don’t know how Demons work.

Even though this was my second time through this book, and I more or less remember the gist of the twists, I still had a hard time following the current status of what the Nightmare was throughout the story. Couple this with the whole “spectral thorns” problem that Dresden was also trying to untangle, and the reader ends up totally overwhelmed with the fantasy side of the plot. If all that isn’t enough, I don’t even think that the Nightmare/spectral thorns is the main event from this book.

Bianca’s ball is.

Which I think underscores my problem with this books’ plot. You can cut all the Nightmare material out and you might have a better book: no Lydia (remember her? yeah, me neither), no Kravos, no Nightmare. Considering that, at the end of the day, there’s this implication the Mavra had somehow given Kravos some knowledge/power, in my edit you cut Kravos out and you have the Nightmare be Mavra or some other lesser member of the Black Court. At least that way you can either spend more time establishing the Black Court’s particular flavour of villainy or spend more time with the latest additions to Dresden’s Army.

Actually, let’s talk about those additions.

Michael! I find Michael such a great foil to Harry in the way they execute on a similar mission. Both parties are out to protect humanity from all the ghoulies that would otherwise waylay us, but I find it so fun to contrast their approaches. The most obvious being where they draw their power from.

Michael makes it clear pretty quick that he does not approve of Harry’s more pagan-sourced arcane abilities. What I love about this comparison is that it gives Butcher an opportunity to explore Harry’s own stance on where his magic comes from, and Harry’s take on religion. Harry has this personal relationship with “his magic”, and often talks about its power coming from “life itself”. It sets up some interesting dilemmas with Harry, in particular when it comes to killing people with magic.

One of the other contrasts between the two is how they prepare for battle. It’s more pronounced in later books, but Michael has this put-together aesthetic with his full suit of knights armour, his templar cloak, and Amoracchius. Meanwhile, Harry is performing rituals with side-walk chalk and brewing potions with Tequila. I mentioned this before, but I think a lot of the charm of Dresden is how scrappy he is. The typical “wizard” from fantasy novels is about a billion years old and has spell components like “eye of newt”, but Dresden is out there fighting the forces of evil with Coke. I love the texture it brings to the world and makes it feel so much closer to our own. As awesome as Middle-Earth is, it’s hard for me identify strongly with the setting because it’s so alien. The humour and tangibility of Dresden’s arsenal draws me into the series.

The other major player we meet this go around is Thomas. It isn’t obvious that he’s going to be important but I find his relationship with Harry is another interesting juxtaposition. Thomas is this aloof playboy with way more money than he knows what to do with. Harry meanwhile is scraping by, constantly on guard against danger and seemingly always strung out to his absolute limits. Thomas is sort of breezing through his life with no real direction (or purpose), while Harry fights for every minute, hell-bound on walking this path he has set out for himself as a defender of humanity, and it makes him seem so much richer in the important ways when put beside Thomas’ vapid existence.

Not to mention Thomas is a vampire.

To risk repeating myself too much, I love that the “bad guys” have all these material advantages. It makes Dresden’s victories so much more triumphant. It highlights Dresden’s character when we see someone with all these resources available to them (Thomas is physically formidable as well) squander their life, highlighting how heroic Dresden is using such meagre means to achieve his goals.

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Some rapid fire thoughts on the other characters we meet:

Lea feels like she gets a bad rap for reasons that are not the most obvious to me. As the books go on we get a clearer picture of how malevolent the faeries can be, but in her introduction, she’s painted as this crazy villain for no real reason. In fact, considering some of the real freak-shows we end up meeting from Faerie, Lea is pretty decent by comparison.

Ferrovax is so interesting. I’m sad we don’t get more from him until Peace Talks, and even then it isn’t much. Perhaps Butcher feels like Dragons are a little hackneyed at this point and didn’t want to follow that particular thread. Oh well.

Lydia turns in to such a nothing burger. At the beginning of this book she seems to have so much going on, she can sort of see the future, is somehow tied to this Demon, gets tangled up with the Red Court and then…leaves forever. Again, knowing now that the first three novels were written in a pack, I figure Butcher re-evaluated some of his characters after this first stint and decided they were no longer interesting/necessary.

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Some closing thoughts: Of the first three novels (if we consider them a pack), I think this one is the strongest, and it starts giving shape to what the series will become. At the same time, it still suffers a bit from some of the gripes I personally have problems with in the first couple Dresden Files. There’s a little too much going on most of the time, and some of the narrative can feel a little juvenile and hormonally-charged when it comes to female characters.

At the same time, it has a great instalment of the Dresden Files underneath that. We kick off the war between the Red Court and White Council, which carries us all the way to Changes and beyond with some permanent repercussions to Dresden and his loved ones. We meet Michael and Thomas, two great contrasting characters to Dresden that will show up again and again and help colour who Dresden is.

To top it off, I’ll admit I’m totally a sucker for love, and the tragic relationship between Harry and Susan is one of the highlights of the series to me.

“You are mad…You would flirt with chaos, destruction - with war. For the sake of this one wounded soul?” “For the sake of one soul. For one loved one. For one life…The way I see it, there’s nothing else worth fighting a war for.”