Harry Dresden: Halfwit for the Plot

[akirlu]

What would you call a wizard who can't manage to lay hands on cold iron in a garden center? I'd call him a moron.

And having somehow failed to find any ferrous shears, pruners, loppers, rakes, spades, aerators, hoes, weeders, lawn mowers, axes, saws, wire, or plant stakes in a garden center, if you were then looking around that self-same garden center for objects to stack or pile up against a 12-foot chain link fence so that you could climb up the pile and get over the top of the fence, would potted saplings be your first choice, or even your thirty-third, among all the possible choices of stuff to try to pile up and walk on? No, mine either. Almost anything in a garden center -- bagged mulch and potting soil, cedar window boxes, hose pots, plant display racks, potting benches, wooden lattices or trellises, or, oh, garden ladders -- would be a more plausible choice for even getting to pile, stack, or lean, let alone climb onto afterward.

But a certain Mr. Butcher -- was there ever so apt a surname? -- apparently couldn't come up with any less idiotic way to introduce the real object of this whole exercise, a portmanteau monster composed of individual saplings. And the plant monster HAD to be introduced. After all, The Author had come up with a terribly clever name for it. We understand that it was a terribly clever name, because once Butcher finds a contrived and awkward means to introduce the word, he uses it about 150 times in the course of two or three pages. The terribly clever name? Chlorofiend. Yeah, it totally slays me, too. The first 126 times, anyway.

For that matter, suppose for a moment that you're a blood-thirsty ogre who has finally trapped your prey in a cul-de-sac of a garden center, with no way out of it. After heated battle, and just exactly as your prey starts kluging together a way out, would you shrug your shoulders and walk off to guard a different exit, counting on some other monster to catch and finish off your quarry? Of course not. No self-respecting, blood-thirsty ogre would. You would stick around to make sure that, by your hand or another's, your prey was smashed into a bloody, greasy pulp on the garden center floor.

Too bad for you, self-respecting ogre. If you did that, The Author wouldn't be able to roll out the Way Cool Chainsaw Ambush Scene two pages later. And we can't have that. So off you trot, little ogre, go stand by a door far from the action and cool your heels until your next cue.

Sigh. Yes, Jim Butcher is getting less godawful as the Harry Dresden books progress. But not enough less. Every now and again, he even manages a clever twist or a well-written paragraph. Unfortunately, that just makes the long swathes of godawful that much more frustrating to endure.

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I begin to be glad I decided not to bother after the first one.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, the story I had heard was that the first two Dresden books were written pell-mell on a bet, without much regard to plot or sense or anything but getting them down on the page, and then got picked up as they were. Theoretically, Butcher is expending more effort on making the books internally consistent now, but as I say, for me, more effort is not the same as enough effort. I will probably keep reading them whenever I can stomach another because in a twisted way, I find them inspirational, and because I've written a character meant to parody Harry -- which means I have to have some idea what it is I'm parodying.

But the Dresden books are clearly not for everyone.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Um. I find myself moved to wonder where the editor was after the books were picked up. (I do see the appeal--after all, I finished the one I started.)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yah, I started reading Butcher's books on a recommendation that they were a well-done version of Laurell Hamilton, without all that superfluous sex. Now, I didn't mind the sex in the Hamilton books per se, but I was really pretty annoyed that an interesting premise -- fugitive fairy princess working as an LA detective and dodging the relatives from Faerie -- got largely dumped, or at least deeply marginalized, in favor of All Sex, All the Time. I will agree that the Dresden books have less sex and more plot, but I don't think they're actually better, just differently bad. But all of this is anent to your comment of understanding the appeal: I think this is a sub-sub-genre that has quite a bit of innate appeal, and no really good practitioners.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Noir detective in a world of magic? HELLBOY!!! But not that disappointing second movie.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Huh. Hadn't thought of Hellboy in this context, but I reckon you're right. (Yeah, the second movie was alarmingly weak in the writing. Luckily, I went primarily for The Pretty, and it did deliver that.)

[prettymuchpeggy.livejournal.com]

All I can say is "ouch" and continue to be grateful to others for slogging through the piffle.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Happy to take that bullet for you. I was going to read it anyway, so I might as well share my impressions...

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

LOL I'm just looking for the Mamma Mia post because I have something to put there, but came across this one first. I finished Storm Front last night for bookgroup on Saturday, and boy was it awful. I've never read any of his because I was pretty sure I wouldn't like them, and now I know. It seems a bit Marty Stu to me, too.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

The Dresden character reads as very Marty Stu to me as well. And yes, Storm Front is especially bad. Butcher must in some sense think so too, because at least some of the affectations of the first book get dropped in subsequent ones.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It's a cute dodge, but no, it doesn't work under the internal rules of the story. Dresden explicitly says that steel counts, and in fact, he uses 'steel' shelving in self defense moments later as well as, as I say, a chain saw, a few pages later. So some ferrous content somewhere seems to be sufficient for his definition of cold iron that will hurt the fey.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Our blood has iron in it.