A block from the Forty-ninth Street Beach there was a run-down garage, the sort of place you only find in the worst sections of big cities. The building consisted of corrugated metal on a steel frame, oxidating in the rain and the mist rising off the lake so that gobbets of rust ran down the walls in streaks and pooled on the sidewalks in uneven puddles. On one side of the garage was a vacant lot; on the other, what looked like the sort of pawn shop where crooks traded in their spare guns and knives for a few extra dollars when things were tight.

I…I don’t think that’s how crooks work, Harry.(It’s particularly ridiculous when there’s already an existing crook/pawnshop connection you could use.)

But I do appreciate that you’ve got new place descriptions instead of doing absolutely nothing but telling us about last book again. And you know what “oxidation” is! Just not the right verb form apparently…?

The garage is called the FULL MOON GARAGE because apparently part of being a werewolf is losing all concept of subtlety, to the point where even Harry is unimpressed.

I didn’t have my gun with me, but I did have my blasting rod, my shield bracelet, and a ring on my right hand in which I had stored up about as much energy as someone twice my size could put into a solid punch.

So not only is magic going to happen, but it’s not going to have to share time with some boring gun? This book is finally picking up!

rare autumn sunshine glared in my eyes

Er….

And isn’t autumn harvest time? Don’t you need sunlight to bring in the crop without it all rotting? And I know Chicago can’t be some weird vortex of terrible autumn weather, because I keep up with gardening catalogs and they’re always talking about Chicago research and testing for the hardy varieties, as if the place is basically representative of the general climate and not some weird twilight city.

He then considers the fact he has absolutely no idea who these people are. He’s sure the other kids in biker clothes were just kids and definitely not a scary gang the other criminals fear, because he definitely knows precisely how scared the other gangs are by virtue of some kid saying he heard the gangs think they’re spooky, and he knows precisely how unscary people who can cover their escape with surprise darkness wolf would be, and is certain the two have no overlap.

Plus, he reiterates that they’re nerdy and nerds are never, ever scary.

That said, one of them is not a nerd but all sexy muscle, and he’s thinking maybe she’s got something to do with the Streetwolves because she’s cool enough for such an awesome gang name.

What, then, had the Alphas been? Biker thugs in training? That sounded ridiculous, even to me. But what if those young people had been lycanthropes, like the ones Bob had told me about? What if they were being trained, somehow, as junior members of the Streetwolves until they could be brought in as full werewolves?

This is really shitty misdirection.

First, we were just told that lycanthropes are violent psychopaths, and Harry made a big deal about how the wolf could totally have murdered him but didn’t and sooooo cooooooooooooool. And wolves are high-strung animals that don’t get along well with humans. The only way lycanthropes would be improved by the transformation is if they’re actually turning into labs or something and have their brain chemistry level out enough to function normally, and Harry’s just misidentifying them because if he knows nothing about cats and he owns one, of course he doesn’t know the difference between a dog and a wolf.

But if that was an actual werewolf, there can’t be any overlap with lycanthropes because it makes no sense they’d be stable enough to get smacked in the head by some asshole spying on them and not even bite the guy a little in response.

Second, WE WERE JUST TOLD THAT LYCANTHROPES ARE VIOLENT PSYCHOPATHS! Every single time Harry so much as thinks of the group he saw, he has to go on a paragraph-long bit about what stupid wussy nerd babies they are and how he wants to pinch their widdle harmless cheeks. And while it’s possible Harry could be that damn stupid, the actual fact of it is we saw some people talking to each other and the most violent it got was one person deciding to do pretend growling to seem cool and in charge and everyone else finding it too embarrassing to even comment on.

On top of that? Harry has no reason to suspect lycanthropes. The actual evidence is that it’s something connected to the moon (so no) and involves an actual transformation (again no). It’s only because he read the script and (spoiler alert!!!!) knows all forms of werewolf will be showing up in a single book because the author thought that was a great idea and not contrived in the least, so now he’s trying to figure out which werewolves go where. This is getting awkwardly shoved in right now because the author’s trying to remind you that lycanthropes are a thing (since you’re obviously dumb enough to have forgotten already), but doesn’t want risk anyone realizing his totally awesome upcoming twist, so Harry has to mention it while avoiding any halfway relevant reasoning, like, “Hey, violent psychopaths are scary, what if these guys are lycanthropes?”

Anyway, Harry finishes with the thought that maybe this is totally unrelated.

My head spun a little, trying to sort out the possibilities.

Harry is dumb and has trouble with the concept of more than one possibility.

He then goes on to hope that the gang of people criminals find scary are out so he can just poke around their stuff.

and find something incriminating inside, something that I could bring back to Murphy and Denton that would point them in the correct direction.

It is baffling, positively baffling, that Harry keeps being told by the police to please for the love of god stop helping please we’ll tell you when we need you.

But so okay, that’s his big plan: hope they aren’t there, rifle through their stuff, then steal something to bring to the police.

And I really must emphasize the “hope” there, because all he’s actually going to do is walk up and try to get in.

There was a regular door beside the pair of big, roll-up garage doors. Both of them were closed. I tried the regular door, and it opened easily enough, so I went on inside. There were no windows, and the only light in the garage fell into it from the open door behind me.
“Hello?” I called into the darkness. I tried to peer around, but saw nothing other than dim shapes and outlines, what might have been a car with the hood up, a couple of those rolling tool-cabinets. There was a dull reflection of glass windows off to one side, where there might have been an office. I stepped to one side of the doorway, squinting, and waited for my eyes to adjust.
There was a quiet sound, a dull rustle of clothing.
Dammit.

Who could’ve foreseen people being in a place they’re found at??????? Shit!

Harry’s response is to reach into his coat for his mighty rod. He then explains he is “not a cop” and “just wants to talk” and shockingly this does not make everything okay.

Finally, someone tells him they already know who he is and he needs to have both hands where the rest of them can see them. Also, they, like basically everyone how are you this dumb Harry, know he works for the cops, so the “not a cop” thing is not really the great card he thinks it is.

“You’re late on the gossip,” I said wryly. “I’m playing doubles with Johnny Marcone now. Didn’t you know?”
There was a snort from the dark. “Like hell. That’s just Marcone’s story. We know the real deal with you, wizard.”
Christ. I wished the police were as savvy as these ne’er-do-wells.

While this does seem sort of flaw-ish, in that he’s not able to capitalize on his reputation, it feels more sueish to me. Like it’s so obvious he’s a good guy who hates mobsters that only the dumb meanyface police could think otherwise.

Part of that is that his retort just doesn’t work. He works with the cops. “Playing with” Steel Bobcat too doesn’t stop that and we know it doesn’t because a whole subplot revolves around people being concerned about dirty cops who work with Marcone, and furthermore Marcone is running a rival criminal organization anyway so one of his guys sniffing around their home base isn’t much better.

Instead of any of this, we get the criminals validating Harry’s whining about how he’s so great why are the police so mean.

Also, this guy has a shotgun.

“All right,” I said. “Come up where I can see you.”
“You don’t give the orders here,” the male voice snarled. “I do.”
I pressed my lips together and drew in a breath through my nose. “I just want to talk to you.”
“About what?” said the voice.
I tried to come up with something, something believable—but I’m not much of a liar. So I told them the truth.

…………………………..

My original decision to drop the book at the first idiot ball just keeps being validated.

I honestly don’t know why this sort of thing happens. I mean, does it really take that much more effort to think of a lie so this wouldn’t be so stupid?

Maybe it does. It seems like some of the authors I see have their biggest skill be their ability to bang something out fast. Maybe that’s why stuff seem so repetitive, the characters just repeat basic information, and like no one ever paused for a second to think about if there’s a better idea. It’s much faster to just charge at the dumbest possible option, double the wordcount by pointing out how stupid it is, then say it works out anyway.

Harry doesn’t even try here. He tells them about everything the police have about wolf tracks and wolf teeth, then follows by demanding to know if they had anything to do with it.

I got a sudden, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. If these people were the murderers, if they were responsible for last month’s deaths, I was in big trouble.

A sudden feeling. Because only now does this occur to him.

And if they were real werewolves, if they could shapeshift and come after me before I could clear out of there, I was as good as dead, shield bracelet or no. I choked down a surge of panic

THIS
WAS
YOUR
PLAN
A

“Kill him,” someone said from the darkness, off to my left, a female voice

Of course it is.

I will grant the book this, though, it is doing pretty good at having women exist, have views other than agreeing with the main character, and even possess a degree of power. I think it’s happening because it’s intended to be noirish in how wrong and broken the world is to have women like this, and how completely awful it is for poor manly man Harry to have to live like this, but it’s better than the fantasy staple of them existing only for sexy punctuation when you realize you need to remind the audience the main character isn’t gay despite spending all his time surrounded by men.

The group takes up her chant. He describes it as a chorus of mewling sounds and I don’t know if it’s that fanfic’s ruined the word for me or if it’s just already pretty weird. If we ignore its use in porn, it’s, uh, baby kitten sounds? I don’t know. Maybe the author remembered it’s sometimes used for birds of prey, so it must be a badass predator sound, and then figured that werewolves are also predators so it’s the word for super scary predator sounds.

My eyes were starting to adjust to the lack of light. I could see them now

Harry, your eyes are shit if it took this long, as you’re a fucking wizard if you’re having this much trouble make yourself a MANLY necklace with a seeing charm on it. Like maybe one of those skulls with a snake in it. Or maybe he could wear those earrings that are huge and stretch the ear.

(Hey wait, can you use tattoos for spell stuff? Not only would this remove the horror of having to wear girly-ass pieces of metal on/through your body in favor of covering your skin in colorful pigments, but it’d also mean Harry could no longer forget his magic items.)

Their eyes glowed like dogs’ eyes in the glare of headlights.

Their eyes appear to be glowing by magic, because as Harry made clear by the fact he just said there’s no light, there’s no light and certainly not headlights level.

This will only get more confusing in a second when we confirm they’re lycanthropes who can’t transform at all, so these are 100% certified human eyeballs doing this.

He realizes that the floor has pillows and blankets on it, so either he walked in on an orgy or they live here and sleep in a big pile, and also they sleep during the day for whatever reason.

The woman voice is still chanting.

The air grew tight and heavy with a kind of energy I had never sensed before, a power that was gaining momentum as they chanted, a feral, raging current.

Harry said last book he could feel energy as an actual thing, but now he’s being super vague and it’s impossible to tell if he means this metaphorically or not. Super annoying.

The boss, which is to say the shotgun guy because shotguns make you the boss, tells them to knock it off.

I could see his body responding as the energy grew, growing tenser, more ready. “Fight it. Hold it in, dammit. You can’t let it loose here. There will be cops all over us.”

Okay, so, being a rage spirit means that chanting about murder makes you commit murder.

It’s never explained why, if being around each other makes them extra easily whipped up, any of them thought to join a gang. Also unexplained is how they managed to last this long without self-destructing.

While shotgun boss is distracted yelling, Harry has the first intelligent thought he’s had in a while and runs.

My motion triggered a frenzied howl from the others in the room and they came surging toward me like a dozen creatures with one controlling mind. The shotgun roared and threw a flash of white light over the room, showing me a frieze of half-dressed or naked men and women hurtling toward me, their faces twisted with grimaces of berserk anger.

But berserkers don’t move like many bodies with a single mind. The whole point of berserkers is they attack anybody, including their allies. Sure, they might be able to handle all being pointed in one direction for a bit, but the best you can hope for is that they’re oblivious to each other.

The big problem, I think, is the insistence on a connection between “madness” and “werewolf”. The historical werewolf kills either because it’s a predatory animal and humans are made of meat or because the person running things is just that evil. If lycanthropes had the mindset of a wolf, or, if the spirit thing is important for whatever reason, the spirit was the essence of predation rather than the essence of inability to plan what you’re doing or distinguish between friend and foe, then forming groups and hunting in packs is reasonable. But these guys are in a group because the author says they should be.

The force of the blast slammed into my shield. It wasn’t quite enough to shatter the protective field, but it made my bracelet grow warm and shoved my opposite shoulder hard against the wall.

I have no idea how his bracelet works. I mean, previously it seemed to be perfectly able to negate all force but would break if it had to do too much. Now it only negates some force? And it’s struggling even with that.

Bullets don’t even have that much force behind them. The whole reason they’re small is because the idea is to focus that force into a very small thing so it has very high proportional force. The total force of gunpowder in a shotgun really isn’t that great, that’s the whole reason for the barrel and pellets.

A tattooed guy, which I guess proves my speculation about those being acceptable right, cuts Harry off.

I drove my fist at his nose as hard as I could. I don’t carry a lot of power on my own when I punch.

Harry physical violence is your preferred conflict resolution mechanism and your favorite form of it is punching people in the fact.

But when I added in the kinetic energy stored in the ring, my fist became a battering ram of bone and flesh, flattening the man’s nose in a gout of blood, and sending him sprawling to the ground six feet away.

Also wouldn’t this break your hand? Or worse, if all that’s concentrated around one bone in one finger… It’s the opposite problem of the shield and bullets. Plus that doesn’t seem like the strength of two men so much as the strength of an angry elephant, and if a punch to the face knocks his whole body six feet away, I’m pretty sure he’s very, very dead. Even assuming the head itself could withstand the force, again we have issues of space. The head is only connected to the rest of the body by a little thing we refer to as the spine. The spine had to exert enough force on the body to pull it those six feet. The man’s neck is likely broken, so he either just died or he’s about to.

“Stop! Stop!” the leader shouted, and I cast a glance over my shoulder to see him, an older man with greasy hair beginning to go grey. He planted his feet in the doorway, facing inside, holding the shotgun across his body and shoving at the people trying to get past him.

Why aren’t they tearing into him if they’re berserk?

Harry may have been stupid enough to turn to look behind while he’s running, but he at least goes back to running and gets to his car, but it doesn’t start. Hey, magebane actually is getting in some baneing of mages today!

My hands were trembling, but I kept trying to get the car going, using every trick I knew to coax the engine to life, while watching the door.

I mean, yes, it’s happening because the author wants to show this off and isn’t going to actually screw Harry over, but that’s a really nitpicky complaint I’m only making because this poor scene is getting judged in the context of Harry never really suffering from a supposed drawback. In and of itself, quite good.

They were screaming and howling, but he shoved them away, clubbed them down with the shotgun like wild dogs, the muscles in his shoulders and back straining. “Parker!” screamed one of them, the woman who had begun the killing chant, “Let me through!” He swatted her down with the butt of the shotgun without hesitation.

We’re about to get to the biggest plot hole of these guys forming packs. You can already see it here – all having a leader does for them is mean someone prevents them from murdering when they want to.

Boss shotgun man then takes a page from Harry’s failbook and looks over his shoulder at Harry. Apparently despite being rage spirits in human shells, soulgaze works. In fact, going by Harry’s description, soulgaze works just about instantly, although this may be just that Harry is terrified and there’s time dilation going on where he doesn’t realize how long they’ve been staring. But no, that’d require the boss guy to spend several seconds making eye contact while everyone else is trying to shove by without realizing he needs to pay attention to that, so – Harry’s soulgaze times are either random, or they’re based on kinship and Harry actually has more in common with rageface here than he does the average person, or Harry got an offscreen powerup and his soulgaze now works much faster.

Fury overwhelmed me, naked lust for meat, for the hunt. I needed to run, to kill. I was invincible, unstoppable. I could feel the power in my arms and hands, feel the raw energy of the wild coursing through me, sharpening my senses to animal keenness.

Okay, so I realize there’s no evidence that there’s a genetic component to this, and therefore the question of how this isn’t being bred out of the population is moot. However, there’s still the secondary question of how they survive childhood, let alone teenagerhood.

I felt his emotions like they were my own. Fury beneath rigid control, the ocean beating at a tide wall. The fury was directed at me, Dresden, at the man who had invaded his territory, challenged his authority, and driven his people out of control, endangering them. I saw that he was the leader of the lycanthropes called the Streetwolves, men and women with the minds and souls of beasts, and that he was aging, was not as strong as he once had been. Others, like the woman earlier, were beginning to challenge his authority. Today’s events might tear him from leadership, and he would never live through it.

Here we go.

If they’re this vicious towards authority and this unable to think things through, why the fuck do they form packs.

People who are on this sort of hair trigger about dominance and control and aggression prefer to find other people who aren’t going to constantly challenge them and who’ll be cowed by their behavior rather than finding it normal. You could see one of them taking over a regular group and ruling it through terror, or acting as individuals

Although there’s a mention of “his people” it sure doesn’t seem to have anything to do with kinship given they kill their leaders as soon as the person weakens. They also don’t seem to give a fuck about if their leader has a clue how to run things given that apparently “let’s attack the dangerous person and implicate ourselves in other murders to the entire police force whoooo!” is a valid challenge to the guy’s power.

The closest to an explanation is that this guy and his group is an anomaly. The whole iron control thing seems like it’s not common, certainly. Maybe he was a super badass in his youth and felt that he should prove it by becoming the boss of things like him. That still doesn’t explain why they didn’t just peel off once they realized they couldn’t beat him and go beat up other people.

(…which is actually how wolfpacks work, so even the dumbass insistence that rage spirit = beast spirit, it’s still how they’d deal with this.)

Anyway, the next thing Harry realizes is that this guy has to show his dominance by killing Harry singlehandedly or else the pack will murder him.

That was the only thing that kept him from coming at my throat that very second.

So even he has barely any control, he’s not actually holding them off because this is a terrible idea but because he knows if he doesn’t insist this fight is his he’ll die. So only self-preservation AND fighting them off on the basis the other prey is his combined can keep him from joining the frenzy – a frenzy triggered by A GUY EXISTING NEARBY THEM.

It’s not even a question of how they lasted this long, it’s a question of how they lasted five minutes at all.

Oh right also no connection with the killings.

Parker’s face was stunned. He had seen me in much the same way I had seen him. I don’t know what he saw when he looked upon my soul. I didn’t want to know what was down there.

Considering he’s a ragemonster, it should be either ERROR INCOMPATIBLE OPERATING SYSTEM or OH MY GOD THERE’S MORE THAN TWO EMOTIONS. I really don’t think he was all impressed by your angsty yet badass secret backstory and the dark power of your soul.

(But seriously, you’d think actual sociopaths would actually be really traumatized by something like this. Imagine being fundamentally unable to connect with or enjoy almost anything, and suddenly getting to feel a normal emotional range for a split second only for it to be yanked away again.)

The author’s now out of things he wants to show, so the car starts.

I shook the entire way, my shoulders so tight with fear and reaction that I could hear my collarbones creaking with strain. I could still hear the mewling chants of “Kill him, kill him,” in my head. Those things in that garage had not been people. They had looked like people, but they weren’t. And they scared the hell out of me.

Speaking of emotions, Harry’s actually doing pretty good at that! He then transitions into rage.

“Stupid, Harry,” I said. “How could you have been so stupid? Why in the hell did you go wandering in there like that? Do you realize how close those Neanderthal freaks came to tearing you apart?”

Wow we are really failing all over the place with the idea ragemonsters map onto actual things aren’t we. Also the problem of yeah, it actually was incredibly stupid and makes no sense.

But emotionally, the idea of Harry responding to trauma and fear by shifting into anger is a solid one. Also last book he said repeatedly that you can use emotions to power things, and as I pointed out then, that should have an impact on how he handles emotions. You probably can’t use fear very well, since it’s based around flight and so hard to displace it into potions and stuff, and it’s pretty hard to deliberately try to worsen your feelings of fear. But it’s really easy to change into anger and really, really easy to pump up your anger more and more. It follows that far from being taught how to handle emotions, wizards are actually encouraged to channel their feelings like this. (Plus it seems likely that anger would work best to weaponize it, so if you can train yourself to turn fear to anger reliably, then if you’re in a dangerous situation you’ll be extra powerful to deal with it.)

I glared ferociously out my side window, at an old lady in a business suit who was staring at me as though I were a ranting madman.

Also Harry and the author have forgotten soulgaze is a thing again despite it happening a few paragraphs ago.

He does feel just generally bad about glaring at random people, so he starts to calm down.

I was able to start thinking straight again

He does manage the calming, but sadly he’s no less stupid thinking straight than he is thinking mad.

Parker and the Streetwolves were not responsible for the murders last month. That didn’t make them any less dangerous.

It objectively does, in that one thing is killing lots of people and the other thing is not.

It’s possible they’ve wracked up quite the body count and Harry’s just so incompetent at soulgazing he missed that they knew about lots of murdering but just not these ones, but it seems like they’re just not very murdery. Harry himself pointed out that the lead guy wanted to tear out his throat and given the guy had to kill him but made no attempt to just shoot him again it seems like the pack wouldn’t accept a gunshot kill anyway. That means that anyone they murder is probably going to be torn apart by hand, which is creepy sure, but also very distinctive (and likely something they’d end up calling Harry about, since it could be mistaken for zombies or something) and also very stupid given there’s a reason we use tools. These guys are basically weaker and more aggressive baboons. I’m not saying getting mobbed by baboons is going to end well for you, but we don’t exactly live in fear of them, you know?

They were lycanthropes, the kind Bob had told me about, and I could see now why they had been feared.

…

People with the souls of beasts, possessed of a ferocity so great that it could transform them into something inhuman without altering a single cell of their bodies.

Harry, you saw a bunch of feral people getting punched out by a single guy blocking a door. We’ve seen no sign of them doing anything impressive unless impressively impulsive counts.

But we’re now solidly in recap territory. Seriously, going to actually quote this to show you how repetitive this book is:

They lived in a pack, and Parker was their leader. I had challenged his dominance in my clueless, bumbling way, and now he couldn’t afford to let me live, or he would be killed himself. So now I had to worry about someone else coming after me, trying to kill me. Not only that, all of this trouble had come gratis, without giving me any lead on the true culprit of the Lobo killings.

I’m not even combining chapters today. This is all one chapter. As soon as it finished happening, the author recapped it.

He then goes on about how he’ll oh so nobly stick around to keep trying to solve this case, despite the fact that we just established that the pack setup is actually designed to make sure Harry only has to face one and as he himself admits: if Parker wanted to kill me, well—he’d find that doing in a full-fledged wizard is no easy task. So it’s also retreading last book’s whole thing of Harry facing an opponent he outclasses in every way.

It wouldn’t even be that hard:

Technically, I suppose, Parker and his lycanthropes weren’t human. The First Law of Magic, Thou Shalt Not Kill, wouldn’t necessarily apply to them. Legally, I might be able to make a case for the use of lethal magic to the White Council.

But that’d be wrong.

I wouldn’t be safe from the loathing I would feel, using a tool made of life’s essence, its energy, to bring an end to life. Magic was more than just an energy source, like electricity or petroleum. It was power, true, but it was a lot of other things as well. It was all that was deepest and most powerful in nature, in the human heart and soul.

Instead, he’ll use an energy source like gunpowder for his murdering, because ending life is fine so long as no magic is involved. Also, he kind of admits that if he can’t do it another way he’d sooner kill than die, so this isn’t even an actual hindrance.

There’s more magic in a baby’s first giggle than in any firestorm a wizard can conjure up, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.

So yeah like most baby things that’s hardwired in and therefore you can trigger it in something braindead with the right electrodes.

Fuck you and your magic bullshit, Harry.

Anyway, to further hammer in that this is sueishness and not a flaw:

Magic comes from what is inside you. It is a part of you. You can’t weave together a spell that you don’t believe in.
I didn’t want to believe that killing was deep inside of me. I didn’t want to think about the part of me that took a dark joy in gathering all the power it could and using it as I saw fit, everything else be damned. There was power to be had in hatred, too, in anger and in lust, in selfishness and in pride. And I knew that there was some dark corner of me that would enjoy using magic for killing—and then long for more. That was black magic, and it was easy to use.

God this is written badly. Okay, so he’s trying to use the wording to mean he doesn’t like that there’s a desire to kill, but “didn’t want to believe” is horrid wording when the rest of the paragraph makes it clear he’s admitted it to himself already and “didn’t want to accept” would fit this better.

Easy and fun. Like Legos.

The capstone metaphors have gone from terribly unneeded to unspeakably terrible.

I might have to do a lot of killing, if I was going to live. I tried not to think too much about what sort of person it might be who survived.

At least the Hunger Games already taught me to never take this bait.

So then Harry heads into his office and resolves to wait for Murphy to call me, and give her any aid that I could. and not, of course, call her himself and relay that hey, this gang that the FBI thought was involved was not at all, so if she was considering that lead herself don’t waste your time and also avoid avoid avoid they’re kind of murdery today.

But before he can nobly sit around not sharing info, he finds his office is full of refrigerated tiger asking to talk.