This may come as a shock to you, Harry, but I don't have an ax with me

[sovay]

Today has been marked mostly by hours of pre-holiday errands and a vision-troubling level of headache, which may somewhat foreshorten this post. The evening has been marked by reading four books starring Harry Dresden. I believe I have hurt myself.

Between the weird casual chauvinism and the general air of having been written by a yak that wanted to be Raymond Chandler (I am insulting either Chandler or yaks), I was not impressed with Storm Front (2000). There was a reason I didn't read these books at the time. rushthatspeaks had promised me a character I would love, however, and so I persevered. Fortunately, the library was missing the next three volumes and by the time of Death Masks (2003), Butcher's style had improved to the point where it was no longer actively contributing to my headache and Rush was quite right about the character; I warmed to him instantly, even though he was more of a cameo. And then there was a lot of confused vampirism and I got to Dead Beat (2005). Rush—

"If I tell you this," I said quietly, "it could be bad for you."

"Bad how?"

"It could force you to keep secrets that people would kill you for knowing. It could change the way you think and feel. It could really screw up your life."

"Screw up my life?" He stared at me for a second and then said, deadpan, "I'm a five-foot-three, thirty-seven-year-old, single Jewish medical examiner who needs to pick up his lederhosen from the cleaners so that he can play in a one-man polka band at Oktoberfest tomorrow." He pushed up his glasses with his forefinger, folded his arms and said, "Do your worst."

Waldo Butters is also brilliant enough that he thinks of forensic science as something anyone can pick up if they don't mind the technical terms, geeky enough to forget how terrified he is of zombies when given the chance to research them, and he has mildly mad science hair ("[it] gave him a perpetual look of surprise that stopped just short of being a perpetual look of recent electrocution"). Apparently I have some kind of type.

I don't think I will be eagerly scouring the bookstores for the rest of this series, but someone should tell me whether they're the sort of thing worth persisting with just for love of supporting characters. It is quite likely that I will keep an eye out for a secondhand copy of Dead Beat, even if the Latin is consistently ungrammatical and the mysterious book should really have been called Das Lied des Erlkönigs. The Tyrannosaur was pretty crowningly awesome.

And now I am going to shower, because I don't feel well at all.

Comments

[coraline]

huh. so maybe i should skip ahead and try again.
(i had the same response to storm front, read the first chapter of the next book to see if there was a dramatic jump between books 1 and 2, and then threw the book out the window.)

on the other hand, i couldn't stand the anita lake books, and the dresden files are an admitted knock-off, so maybe that should have been a sign.

[sovay]

(i had the same response to storm front, read the first chapter of the next book to see if there was a dramatic jump between books 1 and 2, and then threw the book out the window.)

There is visible improvement between the first and fifth on almost all fronts, including the number of times I wanted to knock Harry into a wall. The worldbuilding is still an utter mish-mash, though.

on the other hand, i couldn't stand the anita lake books, and the dresden files are an admitted knock-off, so maybe that should have been a sign.

If you have not read them already, the actually, actively good series about urban magic is Tim Pratt's Marla Mason, which was unfairly discontinued by its publisher a few years ago, although there have been two further crowdfunded novels and some shorter works. They are tightly and gracefully written, full of unusual mythology and the realistic consequences of even magically-enabled asskicking (the protagonist only half-jokingly refers to herself as a brute force-o-mancer), and kink-friendly to a refreshingly casual degree. I am also very fond of the main character, which see above is rarer than it should be.

Basically, I really liked Dead Beat. I'm never going to call it a masterwork of contemporary literature, but it has Waldo Butters and a zombie Tyrannosaur, broken out from the Field Museum and controlled by polka. Pratt's zombie apocalypse, Dead Reign (2008), has several versions of Death, a necromancer with Cotard delusion, and the reanimated mummy of John Wilkes Booth all converging on Felport, which is really not Marla's biggest problem; that would be having to organize a ball. If nothing else, there's just more awesome.

[coraline]

ok, definitely adding the marla mason books to my list -- someone else recommended them a while back, and since then i've also enjoyed some of tim pratt's short fiction. thanks for reminding me!
(i may also go try some later butcher, since i have the books easily available on loan.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Have you read any of Mike Carey's Felix Castor books ?

I am fond of them to a degree that makes it hard for me to be confident in my own objectivity; I think you would like them, but you might well want a second opinion from rushthatspeaks here.

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

I like those, but I don't quite love them. I hear that we're supposed to get Some Answers about the cosmology next book, which is good because it strikes me as awfully unbalanced, in many ways. (If there are demons, where are the angels? And these demons are how old? And...) They're much better at being dark mysteries, and not as good at being freewheeling action-adventures with intricate puzzles for the continuity-aware reader.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

When you say "next book", how far into the series are you ? Some of your questions would strike me as at least implicitly answered in book 4, and the series is up to 5 with a promise of really big revelations in 6.

Not particularly freewheeling, I suppose, and certainly not so actiony as the Dresden books, which is a plus from my perspective because I usually find action scenes dull. I would posit that they do indeed do intricate puzzles, though, but in an Asimovian sort of mode where gathering data to figure out how the hell the world works is the biggest part. And urban fantasy recast as Asimovian scientific-mystery for supernatural values of science just totally hits my buttons.

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

I've read everything out so far, and I'm still not very content with the cosmological state of things, but that's one of the major things that I read fantasy for in general.

Also, for some reason, the way he describes music--and he has to do it a lot, given Fix's talents--annoys the hell out of me. I'll put that down to professional fixations. (Tin whistles are nice, but monophony! Limited!)

[sovay]

Also, for some reason, the way he describes music--and he has to do it a lot, given Fix's talents--annoys the hell out of me. I'll put that down to professional fixations. (Tin whistles are nice, but monophony! Limited!)

Out of curiosity: what does he do with music that annoys the hell out of you, other than apparently a lot of people play tin whistles?

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

Hard to pin down, and I'm not going to go looking for specific passages. He makes him do some things that I'm fairly sure you can't really do with a tin whistle, but it's also that going-for-evocative-but-being-generically-so. I know describing music is hard, so I just wish he'd do less of it.

[sovay]

Have you read any of Mike Carey's Felix Castor books ?

No; I've heard of them, but I don't tend to gravitate toward urban fantasy/supernatural noir.