Blood Rites by Jim Butcher
Jun. 3rd, 2007 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Lost items found. Paranormal Investigations. Consulting. Advice. Reasonable rates. No Love Potions, Endless Purses, or Other Entertainment.
For Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard, there have been worse assignments than going undercover on the set of an adult film. Dodging flaming monkey poo, for instance. Or going toe-to-leaf with a walking plant monster. Still, there's something more troubling than usual about his newest case. The film's producer believes he's the target of a sinister entropy curse - but it's the women around him who are dying, in increasingly spectacular ways.
Harry's doubly frustrated because he got involved with this bizarre mystery only as a favour to Thomas, his flirtatious, self-absorbed vampire acquiantance of dubious integrity. Thomas has a personal stake in the case Harry can't quite figure out, until his investigation leads him straight to Thomas's oversexed vampire family. Harry's about to discover that Thomas's family tree has been hiding a shocking secret: a revelation that will change Harry's life forever.
Butcher sticks to the formula that's made the Harry Dresden series such a success and as such, my comments on Stormfront, Grave Peril by Jim Butcher, Summer Knight and Death Masks continue to apply.
As I said in my review of Death Masks, Butcher is developing a new story arc, focusing on The Denarians and the silver coins they use to tempt humans to serve them and as such, the coin that Harry took at the end of Death Masks and which he placed within a silver circle beneath 10 feet of concrete haunts the events in this story. In fact, I felt that Butcher was more interested in setting up the arc and developing the backstory here than he was in the front-plot, which is a pretty much run-of-the-mill identify-the-culprit-and-stop-them story. As a result, the characters for the front story are not developed at all - their motivation for placing the entropy curse is cursorily dealt with and they aren't even two-dimensional characters. In fact, Butcher is clearly so uninterested in them that he whacks one of the villains off-page and it took me a couple of minutes to work out who they were when it came to the exposition chunk.
Thankfully, Butcher's backstory is much more interesting. For the first time, we meet Harry's mother and start to get an idea of what she was involved in (although not yet why she was doing it) and whilst the big twist with Thomas really isn't a surprise (seriously, if you didn't figure it out when Thomas was introduced in the shocker that was Fool Moon, then you've probably never read a book before), it does give Butcher an interesting platform for the future books. It's also interesting how Ebenezer McCoy and Kincaid are developed - neither are what they seem and both have an interesting backstory with a great deal of potential. Murphy also gets more of a break in this book - I have a big concern with Butcher's female characters as they're always pretty thin in terms of characterization and they tend to fall into either the virgin, crone, whore stereotypes. Murphy has tended to be, in my opinion, a male character with breasts but here we get more of an idea of what makes her who she is by giving a glimpse into her family and her failed mariages, whilst also setting up an interesting backstory of her own by the fact that her father was clearly some kind of policeman-come-paranormal destroyer.
I thought the end of the book was interesting - the fact that Dresden ends up with what's effectively a useless hand gives Butcher all kinds of scope for the future books because now Harry has a visible and painful reminder of his own limitations. I also liked the way he tied in the hand with the coin, leaving a small patch of healed skin with the coin's sigil embedded in it. I'm hoping that Butcher doesn't dwell on the temptation element too much, but it's still a good way of making a character who, to my mind is a little too infallible - more human. Consequently, I've forgiven the obvious Star Wars rip-off.
Speaking of Star Wars rip-offs, I did want to comment on how Butcher seems to be adding more knowing-nods and winks of popular culture to his dialogue. At first, this was entertaining - Butcher kept it to one-offs and it felt like a nice little geeky in-joke that helped contextualise what was happening. Now he's using it more frequently and it's becoming boring. It's also more obvious how he's shoe-horning it into the dialogue and at times it makes it very clunky. He needs to prune again.
As always, Butcher has difficulty keeping his timelines and details straight. Timeline aside (which I've given up correcting because he's obviously not taking it seriously) this time around the big mistake relates to the concept of the threshold. Butcher has been careful to bring up thresholds in the previous books and how important it is for Harry to be invited into a house because a 'proper' home that houses a family and is filled with love can be difficult to work magic in without an invitation. As a result, Harry's previously told us that his threshold is weak because he doesn't have a family and therefore he's not confident it could withhold a supernatural attacker who crosses it. However in this book, Harry suggests that his threshold would still have a lot of power in it for absolutely no reason at all other than the fact that it's a threshold. Nice one, Jim.
The Verdict:
The story arc looks promising and Butcher finishes the book in a way that leaves interesting options for the future books. However, he definitely has difficulty keeping his timelines and 'canon' in check and because he's focused on his story arc, the main plot of this book is somewhat cursory. It's still an entertaining way to pass a few hours, but because of the complicated arc, I suspect it will be difficult for readers entirely new to the series to dive in and start with the later books.
For Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard, there have been worse assignments than going undercover on the set of an adult film. Dodging flaming monkey poo, for instance. Or going toe-to-leaf with a walking plant monster. Still, there's something more troubling than usual about his newest case. The film's producer believes he's the target of a sinister entropy curse - but it's the women around him who are dying, in increasingly spectacular ways.
Harry's doubly frustrated because he got involved with this bizarre mystery only as a favour to Thomas, his flirtatious, self-absorbed vampire acquiantance of dubious integrity. Thomas has a personal stake in the case Harry can't quite figure out, until his investigation leads him straight to Thomas's oversexed vampire family. Harry's about to discover that Thomas's family tree has been hiding a shocking secret: a revelation that will change Harry's life forever.
Butcher sticks to the formula that's made the Harry Dresden series such a success and as such, my comments on Stormfront, Grave Peril by Jim Butcher, Summer Knight and Death Masks continue to apply.
As I said in my review of Death Masks, Butcher is developing a new story arc, focusing on The Denarians and the silver coins they use to tempt humans to serve them and as such, the coin that Harry took at the end of Death Masks and which he placed within a silver circle beneath 10 feet of concrete haunts the events in this story. In fact, I felt that Butcher was more interested in setting up the arc and developing the backstory here than he was in the front-plot, which is a pretty much run-of-the-mill identify-the-culprit-and-stop-them story. As a result, the characters for the front story are not developed at all - their motivation for placing the entropy curse is cursorily dealt with and they aren't even two-dimensional characters. In fact, Butcher is clearly so uninterested in them that he whacks one of the villains off-page and it took me a couple of minutes to work out who they were when it came to the exposition chunk.
Thankfully, Butcher's backstory is much more interesting. For the first time, we meet Harry's mother and start to get an idea of what she was involved in (although not yet why she was doing it) and whilst the big twist with Thomas really isn't a surprise (seriously, if you didn't figure it out when Thomas was introduced in the shocker that was Fool Moon, then you've probably never read a book before), it does give Butcher an interesting platform for the future books. It's also interesting how Ebenezer McCoy and Kincaid are developed - neither are what they seem and both have an interesting backstory with a great deal of potential. Murphy also gets more of a break in this book - I have a big concern with Butcher's female characters as they're always pretty thin in terms of characterization and they tend to fall into either the virgin, crone, whore stereotypes. Murphy has tended to be, in my opinion, a male character with breasts but here we get more of an idea of what makes her who she is by giving a glimpse into her family and her failed mariages, whilst also setting up an interesting backstory of her own by the fact that her father was clearly some kind of policeman-come-paranormal destroyer.
I thought the end of the book was interesting - the fact that Dresden ends up with what's effectively a useless hand gives Butcher all kinds of scope for the future books because now Harry has a visible and painful reminder of his own limitations. I also liked the way he tied in the hand with the coin, leaving a small patch of healed skin with the coin's sigil embedded in it. I'm hoping that Butcher doesn't dwell on the temptation element too much, but it's still a good way of making a character who, to my mind is a little too infallible - more human. Consequently, I've forgiven the obvious Star Wars rip-off.
Speaking of Star Wars rip-offs, I did want to comment on how Butcher seems to be adding more knowing-nods and winks of popular culture to his dialogue. At first, this was entertaining - Butcher kept it to one-offs and it felt like a nice little geeky in-joke that helped contextualise what was happening. Now he's using it more frequently and it's becoming boring. It's also more obvious how he's shoe-horning it into the dialogue and at times it makes it very clunky. He needs to prune again.
As always, Butcher has difficulty keeping his timelines and details straight. Timeline aside (which I've given up correcting because he's obviously not taking it seriously) this time around the big mistake relates to the concept of the threshold. Butcher has been careful to bring up thresholds in the previous books and how important it is for Harry to be invited into a house because a 'proper' home that houses a family and is filled with love can be difficult to work magic in without an invitation. As a result, Harry's previously told us that his threshold is weak because he doesn't have a family and therefore he's not confident it could withhold a supernatural attacker who crosses it. However in this book, Harry suggests that his threshold would still have a lot of power in it for absolutely no reason at all other than the fact that it's a threshold. Nice one, Jim.
The Verdict:
The story arc looks promising and Butcher finishes the book in a way that leaves interesting options for the future books. However, he definitely has difficulty keeping his timelines and 'canon' in check and because he's focused on his story arc, the main plot of this book is somewhat cursory. It's still an entertaining way to pass a few hours, but because of the complicated arc, I suspect it will be difficult for readers entirely new to the series to dive in and start with the later books.
