Read All About It: Grave Peril

Jim Butcher's fateful series continues with a third novel, Grave Peril. The Dresden Files are an interesting urban fantasy series that showcases magic in a very unique way by dividing it up into categories, and then blowing those categories to hell with a police-consultant protagonist.

Harry Dresden is an interesting figure, and Butcher writes him as an anti-social, morally grey hero. The novels are fast-paced, visually strange, and create vivid action and entertaining magic within the urban fantasy genre. Grave Peril is an average modern paranormal novel, and tries to set up the scene for even more novels which will address a larger plot arc.

Chicago's only wizard, Dresden is in a tight spot. Helping out as a supernatural sleuth for Chicago's police department just got a lot harder--tormented ghosts are haunting the streets, and there are way too many of them for comfort. It's up to Dresden to figure out why they're so agitated, and try to keep himself and his friends safe from vampires, ghosts, demons, and bullets.

And if Harry doesn't succeed, there's a worse fate than death waiting for him.

Grave Peril has an intriguing description, a brand new villain, and some very nasty ghosts to try to keep readers entertained. There's no end to the action or to Dresden's backtracking and often last-minute decisions. At every turn, our hero is obstructed, lost, or just tired--and it's starting to drag. Dresden gets victories at a very high cost, suffers traumatizing injuries that miraculously only put him out-of-commission until the next round of action. I like powerful and dedicated protagonists as much as the next girl, but I'm getting kind of bored with Dresden's convenient survival abilities.

Also, Grave Peril starts after a significant time gap from the last novel, and it makes me feel like there was a whole other narrative that we could have gotten between Fool Moon and this one. One of the main villains is someone who has already been locked up, and is wreaking havoc on Dresden because of what he did in that liminal space between novels. Butcher's writing has a lot of holes in it in that form--Harry is now in a full-blown relationship, he's getting regular business, and then all of a sudden it just stops being fun and starts being a boring story.

Also, I'm still angry about how Butcher writes women. They exist for Dresden to look at, and every time he sees them we get another description of their curves and face. In this particular novel, most of the women are either heinously evil or basically useless. Even Murphy, the bad-ass detective, is put out of commission for the entire novel. Meanwhile, Dresden's love interest faces an incurable conundrum, and Butcher writes her out of the narrative. The other women are tortured, killed, and abused by Butcher's writing. It's not very conducive to continuing this series, so this one is up in the air.

The Dresden Files is a promising series, but even with the consistent suggestions of a larger plot arc after this novel, I'm starting to lose my interest. Dresden is a fun hero, but he continually makes the same mistakes, views himself as the end-all of wizardry in Chicago, and sexualizes every woman he comes across. Not exactly an ideal hero, readers.

Hopefully the next novel in the series, Summer Knight, turns out to be the savior of this series, so let me know if you enjoyed it! Hopefully I'll pluck up the courage to continue this series, if only to give you guys some warning. Good luck with your own reads this summer--and let me know about the ones you love!