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.