Last time, Harry does his usual dragging of his feet, but as usual, plot means he’s still forced to get there in time, and then he fights vampires and nearly dies and then chance saves his ass in the nick of time, but now he’s doped up on vampire spit.
Harry apparently physically walks back to his house, presumably in the dark because sundown happens at the end of the vampire fight.
Why did the vampires run, anyway? Once doped up, Harry seems helpless, and once in the car, they don’t need to worry about sun. So, wait a couple minutes for the sun to finish setting, get back out, finish nomming Harry, rest of the series can follow Murphy like god intended.
Mister is there in the apartment when he gets there, showing that no, he made no effort to look for anybody and probably just fucked a bunch of cats until he got tired and came back. Harry tries lying down, but his cat walks on his face, so he gets up long enough to drop cold cuts in Mister’s plate because Harry doesn’t understand how to feed pets.
Since he’s up, he stumbles to the bathroom.
I shielded my eyes and studied myself in the mirror.
Wow, Harry’s so out of it he’s hallucinating a mirror! He must be, because he explicitly said, I don’t keep any mirrors in my home. Too many things can use mirrors as windows-or doors- back in the first book.
Hm, come to think of it, that sounds like another way of getting around threshold rules.
I couldn’t find any marks on my throat, so the vampire hadn’t bitten me.
Yes, because obviously the magical creature can’t possibly bite and drain you without leaving an obvious mark, I mean, that’d be impossible! Hey, remember how you saw a total of absolutely zero marks on any of Bianca’s people?
It’s not that Harry shouldn’t be able to rule stuff out, but he has to have actual functional reasoning. “I don’t see a mark and also vampires can’t heal people” works just fine, for example, but right now, most of what we know about vampires is that Harry doesn’t know how vampires work.
He explains that if he was bitten, it makes a link, which allows vampire mind control, which, just saying, might also be able to make you not see a mark that’s totally there.
Often, a viewpoint character is ignorant of the setting because it lets them ask questions of other characters, but Harry doesn’t do that and this is written conversationally and it’s even set up as him explaining magic to a presumably ignorant audience. Having him be ignorant of the setting just means no one has any clue what’s going on. Is mind-control not actually messing with your head but just puppetting you around? Or is it like the happy drug he’s already on, but way stronger and with more of a focus on obeying orders?
He also casually adds that this mind control is Breaking one of the Laws of Magic. except evidently vampires do that all the time with no consequences, so that doesn’t really fit, does it? It’s a rule that wizards have to follow but not one they enforce on anybody else. And as Harry defends himself messing with fairies by saying fairies don’t count because they’re not human while flipping Morgan off, it looks like mind-control is only banned when it’s used within your particular group. If there’s any overlap of laws at all between different factions – and there’s no reason to think there would be – it’d be that vampires mind-controlling over vampires is breaking the law.
I stumbled back to my bed and sank down onto it, trying to sort out my thoughts.
My lovely, throbbing body made this fairly difficult. Mister came nosing around again, but I shoved him away with one hand and forced myself to ignore him.
…so Harry jacks off in bed for a while, I guess?
Harry explains that Justin, otherwise known as Dude I Lit On Fire, was kind of obviously evil the whole time and abusive to the point Harry has a ton of practice magically blocking off pain to focus, a skill seen all of never before. Anyway, now that he’s pulled a new skill out of his ass with a backstory justification, he says he should get to use that on pleasure too, so he does. Apparently, though, vampire spit is really good at its job, and he ends up having to pretty much wipe all sensation:
started shutting down perception of my limbs, pushing them behind the walls with the rest of me that wasn’t doing any good.
After turning off almost his whole nervous system, he’s ready to do the mid-book detective reasoning, except he’s only talked to one guy and has pretty much nothing to go on.
Lydia had fled the shelter of the church, and Father Forthill’s protection. Why? I thought back, over the details of everything I knew about her. Her sunken eyes. The tingle of touching her aura. Had her hands been shaking, just a little? I think they had, in retrospect.
It says some bad things about Harry that he’s struggling to figure out why Lydia left.
He then somehow remembers her exact pulse rate in the van was sixty beats a minute, says that his with the drug is about thirty, so for some reason her heart was beating oddly fast.
Kyle and Kelly had poisoned her, as they had me, I was sure of it. Then why had her heart been beating so quickly, in comparison?
Harry does say he’s still a bit out of it even blocking out most of the drug’s effects, so maybe it’d be mean to mock him for this, but:
1) Kyle and Kelly are vampires and Kelly had obviously just drunk blood.
2) She was extremely pale and weak.
3) Loss of blood causes increased heart rate.
This is not that fucking hard.
Harry then proceeds to hop on the bullshit train straight for fucking no evidence you dumbfuck.
She left the church and had been taken, perhaps, by the Nightmare. Then gone to Malone’s house under its guidance, and gotten an invitation in. But why go to Malone’s house? What did he have to do with anything?
“She MAYBE got possessed by a ghost, then obviously this chain of events played out. I’m going to continue to ignore the fact there are vampires despite just a few paragraphs ago adding that they can totally control people’s minds.”
Instead, Harry drops that entire chain of reasoning and opens up the brand new, unrelated topic of what’s up with the vampires. Maybe they’re working with the nightmare? The one he still has no evidence of doing anything but trying to kill Lydia?
Also, he says the vampire twins are Bianca’s most powerful goons on the grounds of fucking nothing.
Then he starts wondering about the nightmare getting over the threshold even as he continues to insist Lydia totally was how it got there.
Finally, Harry loses his grip on the poison and falls into a daze, which at least means he’ll stop saying such stupid shit. Then he dreams about the time he fought another magic user and a demon, because he will just not shut up about that.
I think it’s the same problem of him explaining thresholds then meeting the rapist skull and acting baffled at the idea thresholds would be a thing, namely, intense contempt for the reader. If he’d dropped references to multiple things he’d done, how would we keep up with this super-complex plot?
Anyway – full moon, every article of clothing on Harry is black, including my black sneakers, which were better for … well. Sneaking. except then they promptly malfunctioned because although the concept of sneakers is within Harry’s supposed cutoff, there’s been intense marketing between then and now, so cheap sneakers should come under the same heading as a brand-new radio. Those shoes should be disintegrating with every step he takes.
Michael stood beside me, his breath steaming in the winter air, dressed in his cloak, his full mail, his bloodred surcoat.
Has no one explained the concept of camouflage to this man. It’s one thing to wear a fancy cloak when you’re up against ghosts who can’t even notice you without a song, dance, and magic spell booster, it’s another when you’re going up against other humans.
The rest of the police are there too, and they’ve all got holy water and silver crucifixes, which I guess work on demons? See, the “faith” handwave lets us get around problems like how demons that have been around from the dawn of time can be hurt by a crude representation of something that happened a mere two thousand years back, except in that case where are the stars of david and science textbooks? (Come on Harry, you bashed us for worshiping science, it’s either a religion or not.) Now, if we’re arguing pop culture counts as faith that could work, but I can’t imagine people could really muster a very strong faith when they barely believe in magic and we know Harry held off a raging vampire with his faith pentagram yet didn’t even attempt it on a demon.
(Also, yes, this includes the same people who insist Harry is a bullshit artist – why they’re carrying holy water when they could have more guns is unclear. And this is an option, but only taken by Micky, who supposedly gets along well with Harry.)
Harry proceeds to explain the sorcerer/wizard distinction.
It’s sort of like being a wizard, only he spends all his energy doing things that are mostly destructive. He isn’t good at doing anything that doesn’t fuck someone up.”
So it’s just a crappier, NPC-only wizard class.
Note Harry doesn’t even say the guy is better at fucking shit up, although vagueness works both ways so technically the guy could be one of those focused wizards we keep coming back to as a great idea that needs to be implemented. Harry does say the guy has power.
“Demon,” breathed Rudolph. “Jesus, can you believe this shit?”
I remind you that Harry said everyone has holy water and silver crucifixes, so yes, you all believe this shit.
I mean, I can see people being willing to carry an extra thing because you’re scared and you have nothing better, but their entire plan revolves around locking the demon and magic user down and Harry is in charge, skepticism is clearly not in play here.
And given the plan is “protect us while we deal with the terrifying high-priority targets that will fucking mince you if we fail”, how is anyone a skeptic seeing this go down?
Harry then does voodoo with a bit of hair from the crime scene and a doll. He’s also dabbed some mouse blood on there. Unclear if this is the magic needs blood to work reasoning or if Harry just assumes the guy is splattered with blood like an incompetent and is trying to make the doll resonate with that sloppiness.
He became aware of the spell taking effect a few seconds before it could close off his power altogether-and with those few seconds he had, he reached out and broke the circle around the demon with his will and his hand, then in a screaming rage compelled it to attack.
Meanwhile, Harry responded to someone having his hair and not even doing a spell for hours with “eh, I guess I could lie down and die?”
So, the demon jumps them, and the dream diverges. Michael is supposed to hack apart the demon because type advantage, and the now magicless magic-user tries and fails to run for it. Instead, Harry fails the spell and Michael fails at faith. Imaginary Murphy switches to Plan B, holy water, and this too does nothing so she gets ripped apart. Then Plan C, bullets, gets Malone killed gruesomely. And hey, points for him getting the nastiest death:
it simply laughed, grabbed the end of the shotgun, and slammed Malone against a wall, shoving the hardwood stock against the man’s belly until he screamed, until the flesh began to rip, until ribs started crackling, and then shoved harder, until I could clearly hear, even above the sound of Malone’s retching, the bones in his spine start to splinter and break.
Unpleasant, but at least we’ve broke the creepy streak of this stuff largely happening to women.
Harry finds himself alone, then finds that somehow he’s been depowered by the spell, and this, not everything else, is what makes him think it’s a dream. Apparently Michael being completely powerless before something he should be able to curb-stomp or the power of God itself getting chucked in the demon’s face without effect are less unbelievable than Harry not being able to blast threats into a fine ash.
And to Harry’s credit, I guess that’s not just narcissism, it does pretty well describe his life.
He insists this isn’t the way it goes, and the demon says it’s how it happens now and decides to chow down on his viscera. Harry screams in agony until the far worse agony of kitty claws to the face wake him. That…no, that actually sounds pretty plausible. Tomcats even have blunted claws from all the walking, so they really tear.
Harry wakes up in the corner of the room covered in vomit. Mister, evidently deciding a spot more suffering would really bring this together, then, almost judiciously, delivered another scratch to my cheek.
There’s something else as well.
Something rippled along my skin. Something cold and dark and nauseating.
But then it seems gone.
I shook, violently. I was terrified. Not frightened, not apprehensive-viciously and unremittingly terrified. Mindless, brain-stem terror, the kind that quite simply bypasses rational thought and heads straight for your soul. I felt horribly violated, somehow, used.
This has been a generally unpleasant book, hasn’t it.
He manages to get downstairs and into his summoning circle, then closes it around him.
Mister prowled around the circle, a rumbling, reassuring purr in his throat. Then I heard the big grey cat hop up onto the work table, and over to one of the shelves. His dim shadow curled up by the pale bone of the skull. Orange light began to glide out of his mouth, into the skull’s eye sockets, until Bob’s candleflame eyes blinked, and the skull turned to focus on me.
Ah, that’s a nice spot of description.
Now out of a cat and with sympathy for Harry if no one else, the rapist skull says he knows what’s going on now.
“I think I know what just tried to eat you.”
So yeah, that was a pretty good bang. Shame it’s after so much bullshit.
Mmmyes. This would be such a good book if it was just Harry suffering like this all that time, not just for one chapter after 4-5 other women have suffered more, usually because of Harry.
I don’t know Farla,ive never really liked books where everything is 100% explained and the main characters knows all. What JB is doing here is more exciting to me. Not everything needs a reasoning behind it sometimes things just are.
I thought it’d be obvious that Harry only got the dream was a fake memory when his lost his magic. People remember their own actions more clearly than others
The big issue here is that the book posits itself as a mystery. Harry is supposed to figure out what’s going on before he can resolve the issue. Here we see him, as Farla said, the standard mid-book detective reasoning.
And the thing about mysteries is that they all operate on the principles of fair play. The exact rules change depending on specific genre (in classic mysteries the police should never be complicit in the crime while in noir crooked cops are to be expected), but the gist of it is that the readers must have sufficient information to uncover the truth all on their own, perhaps even before the detective does. Stuff like hiding a crucial bit of evidence via narrative tricks (a detective receives a letter that becomes an important clue to the culprit’s identity, but readers are not told about its contents, for example) or the culprit being a character who isn’t introduced until they’re revealed as a culprit and other such things are forbidden.
Doing otherwise destroys the mystery, makes it arbitrary and exposes author’s hand in constructing it, thus eliminating the immersion. It becomes clear that we aren’t following logical reasoning to reach the right conclusion and uncover the truth, but merely allow the author to lead us by the hand and show what he has cooked up, which is mostly just disappointing.
It also doesn’t help that the world’s logic relies on authorial fiat. We see that here — often, Harry will just declare How Things Are without any rhyme or reason, in a way that makes it clear he’s right despite no evidence leading to those conclusions.
This obviously flies in the face of fair play, but then, these aren’t really detective stories so much as they are Self-Insert Is Alpha stories.
It does raise the interesting question of what fair play looks like in a world that we inherently don’t know the rules of — ie, urban fantasy — and I think that’s strong, strong worldbuilding. Basically everything about how a universe works would have to be determined long in advanced and be ridiculously consistent, with rules all leading into each other logically. It’d be damn hard to do.
I’m trying to make my brain remember Kara no Kyoukai right now, because that was kind of an attempt at making urban fantasy mysteries work, right? IIRC, the clues to the mysteries tended to be tangential to anything actually supernatural.
… was KnK actually about mystery? I read it so long ago, it’s a blur. The Azaka/Shiki boarding school volume was definitely a mystery, right?
KnK was more of a thriller/psychological horror with mystery elements being subserviant to it. I don’t think it really abides the fair play rules, especially given how opaque it tends to be, but the focus was always more on character study, so it works better there.
So it was just noir-ish, not actual mystery noir. That’s fine. That works. It was still very good.
The boarding school story was the one that was much more traditional mystery, and I thought it was done really, really well. It was my favorite bit if I remember correctly.
I think it works because of the focus on whydunnit.
The howdunnit is revealed pretty early on, and there are, like, two characters besides Azaka and Shiki around, so whodunnit is not exactly hard to guess, plus it’s revealed at midpoint. From there on, the book focuses heavily on motives of people involved, on what drives them and why they go to such great lengths to do what they do. Plus, of course, the exploration of Azaka and Shiki’s characters and relationships.
As a result, the book has heart, which is slowly exposed to us and keeps our attention throughout the story.
By contrast, Harry here seems incapable of even speculating about Lydia’s motives, vampires’ motives are pretty basic, the true culprit is primitive, so we’re left only with the technical puzzle, which is rather lacking.
In conclusion, go read Umineko.
For without love it cannot be seen.
Yeah, the world-building needs to be laid down hard before you can do a mystery like that. Most urban fantasy that go for mystery fall into oneof the two traps: either the detective holds readers’ hands every step of the way and there is no way to get ahead because we don’t have enough info to go on, or the answer becomes blindingly obvious since the info provided to us is very specific and can be combined with the crime in only one way.
There are ways to make it better, though. Closed circle is a good one. If there are only five characters locked on an island while storm prevents anyone from coming to it or escaping it, it would be easy to explain their powers and afterwards speculate how a crime could be committed by one of them.
I think it wouldn’t be too hard to make a magical detective story, especially with the amount of time we dedicate to Harry babbling on. The real breaking point is it being a magical kitchen sink detective story, where the main character never rules out anything.
If Harry mentioned vampires can’t heal right now, that would both rule out getting bit more firmly AND count as a clue that there’s living and dead variants of magic. We know he identified the barbed wire as not living magic, so that would then point the finger at vampires. We know vampires are stopped by thresholds and can infer they’re familiar with shenaniging their way past those whenever possible. (Also we should know about their interactions with ghosts – vampires might be easily damaged by ghosts and generally avoid them, they might be extra good at controlling ghosts, maybe they just can’t interact with them at all and it’s totally impossible for them to be directly involved, etc.) You could have the character tell us the relevant information piecemeal and come to the wrong conclusion themselves.
Instead, we don’t even know if vampires are dead or not and Harry continues to ignore the fact they exist at all when considering the problem.
While it’s true sometimes not all answers should be answered, this is seventeen chapters in. If it’s the same length as Storm Front, that’s more than half of the story without answers. Someone should know more now or the payoff is quite poor.
Not to mention its basically 2 and a half books in and Butcher is still only mentioning stuff five seconds before it becomes relevant.
“He explains that if he was bitten, it makes a link, which allows vampire mind control”
There’s that Butcher creativity again. He probably had to watch two or three crappy vampire movies to come up with that.
Speaking of issues with no answers in a mystery, I feel that the attempt to combine noir with urban fantasy is the reason for the abysmal pacing I complained about in the previous chapter.
Normally, the first half of the detective novel would be filled with introductions of important players, investigating the crime scene, finding clues and getting witness accounts, but Butcher needs space to talk about threshold and ghosts and vampire saliva and thresholds, which eats up a good chunk of the book, leaving little space for, you know, talking to people and doing the detectiving.
Basically, instead of plot we get exposition because without it we wouldn’t understand the plot.
It doesn’t account for all problems (the repeated references to that demon summoner eat up a good chunk of the book as well and could have been cut by two thirds at least), but it does explain some of them.
Honestly it doesn’t help that the basics were never explained. Like, Dresden comes off as a complete newbie only just now learning about things despite supposedly being a super-amazing master wizard and one of the foremost experts on magic in the world. So he constantly gets re-explainations, and Butcher just can’t leave it that people have read the former books, so nothing gets explained until right before its relevant. Which kind of makes the mysteries not-so-mysterious.
And Butcher isn’t even working with original concepts, he’s working with classic horror archetypes: werewolves, vampires, ghosts, etc. And sure, there must have been dozens of different depictions of vampires in modern media by now, but a paragraph or two of exposition would be enough to let the reader know what a Dresdenverse!vampire is supposed to be.*
Plus, back in the first novel, the murder weapon was magic, but everything else could have (and should have) been solved with good old mundane “detectiving”. Butcher just sucks at writing mysteries.
* We can see that even in Romantic / Gothic vampire fiction: two important elements in the earliest stories, written back when vampire folklore wasn’t as strong as it used to be in Western Europe (particularly among “enlightened” circles), were the protagonist trying to find out what was going on, and then looking for a way to fight the supernatural menace. By contrast, as vampire fiction gained popularity, the stories hardly needed any exposition at all, since the public was already familiar with the conventions of the genre.