Faeries, Zombies, and Wizards: Dead Beat by Jim Butcher

So I’ve slowly been reading through all three hundred or so books that have been nominated for the Hugo Award, in order to figure out how I would vote for each year. It’s a useful exercise, not only for producing content for my writing blog, but for judging the evolution of science fiction and fantasy over the last century (or at least, the part of it that appeals to the most outspoken corner of fandom). In 2015, book 15 (Skin Game) of the Dresden Files was nominated, so I knew I would eventually have to tackle that series. Then, I heard an interview with Jim Butcher on the Writers of the Future podcast, in which he suggested that new readers start with book 7 (Dead Beat) instead of book 1, so that’s where I decided to start.

Until I picked up this book, I hadn’t really read much urban fantasy. I read the first Monster Hunter International book years ago, and a few short stories here and there, but I was never really big on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which seems to be the cultural watershed that most urban fantasy fans point back to as their starting point with the genre) and fantasy stories set in the modern world never really did it for me. When I do read fantasy, I typically prefer portal fantasy like Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, or secondary world fantasy like Conan or Tolkien—and yes, I know that both Conan and Tolkien technically happen in a forgotten age of our own world, but Middle Earth and Hyboria are so different from the world as we know it that they might as well be secondary worlds.

All of that is to say that I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book as much as I did. It’s really quite good! Jim Butcher really knows how to tell a great story: one that hooks you from the beginning and doesn’t let up until the end. And while I could tell that there was a bunch of stuff that had happened in the previous books, like discovering he has an incubus brother, or acquiring faerie housekeepers (which is absolutely hilarious), with the way Butcher handled it, it wasn’t a problem at all that I didn’t know any of the backstory behind all of that. In other words, he gave me just enough to understand what was happening without getting bogged down in a recounting of all of that previous stuff.

Another thing that Butcher balanced really well was Harry Dresden’s personal life vs. the overarching politics of the supernatural community, with his various courts and councils all vying for power against one another. A lot of stuff happens in this book that I’m sure will have political ramifications in later books, such as the ongoing war between the White Council and the Red Court, but the book is more about Harry Dresden and his role in all of these machinations than it is about the political machinations themselves. And Harry Dresden is a really great character to follow: smart, strong, competent, and brave, but also very down-to-earth in his flaws—and in this particular book, he’s constantly the underdog. Seriously, it was like everything he tried to do, he failed terribly at it, to the point where I was starting to wonder if perhaps the bad guys were going to win after all.

More than anything else, though, this book—and all the other Dresden File books that I’ve read since—are just a load of fun. This is a minor spoiler, but when Harry Dresden brought Sue the Dinosaur back as a zombie T-rex and stomped around Chicago fighting the bad guys with her, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud as I was listening to that part of the audiobook. It really was a crowning moment of awesome—of which there were actually several in this book, each one more entertaining than the last. The fact that Jim Butcher has never won a Hugo or a Nebula Award for any of his Dresden Files books—indeed, the fact that he was never even nominated for an award until the Sad Puppies put him on the slate—is a damning indictment of the cliquishness and poor quality of those awards.

With all of that said, though, I’m probably not going to read much urban fantasy outside of Jim Butcher and Larry Correia. I’m on book 10 of the Dresden Files right now, and I can tell that one of the conventions of the genre is to throw in lots and lots of sex or sexual innuendo. For the most part, I think Butcher handles it tastefully, mostly as a way of highlighting how lonely and sexually frustrated Harry Dresden is (which at times can be hilarious), but I don’t trust other authors to be as tasteful—and indeed, there are times where even Butcher has made me mentally roll my eyes. Also, it’s not quite as interesting or engaging when you’re no longer a sexually frustrated singleton yourself.

But genre conventions aside, I am really enjoying the Dresden File books! After I’ve read up through the latest installment of the series, I will probably go back and listen to the first six books, then acquire them all for the Vasicek family library. They’re quite good.