Yuffie's Book Reviews

Storm Front (The Dresden Files #1) - by Jim Butcher

Storm Front is the debut novel by Jim Butcher. It stars Harry Dresden, a wizard private investigator who is also a consultant for Chicago PD with supernatural cases.

The case he's dealing with in this book involves two murder victims who got their hearts exploded out of their chests. Obviously there's a supernatural cause, so Harry is brought in to figure it out. He gets another job on the side investigating a woman's missing husband.

Eventually the magical wizard council thing starts believing Harry's the one behind the murders. His partner in Chicago PD also thinks he did it. So he now has to clear his name before more people die, before the wizard behind the murders finds him and kills him, and before the wizarding council arrives to execute him. So basically everyone's after Harry!

The best parts of this book were when Harry used supernatural, wizardly ways to get the info he wanted. It puts a unique spin on your classic detective novel. I almost wish he used magic more than he had because those scenes were just awesome.

The plot was... interesting. Once Harry got framed for the murders about halfway through, the plot took off and got really interesting. Before then, it seemed like Butcher had some kind of sex fetish. Everything-and I mean EVERY THING-in this story talked about sex or alluded to it or involved it. It was weird. The two murder victims were having sex when they were killed, so they were still in the position. Every woman Harry meets is drop-dead gorgeous and some kind of sex-goddess, and he's always commenting on it. He's investigating the missing husband and finds out there was an orgy happening in his lake house. The two female murder victims were escorts (ie. high-end prostitutes, for those of you who aren't familiar with the term), Harry's skull spirit friend is a peeping tom, one woman accidentally drank a love potion and Harry was naked in this one scene because a demon attacked when he was in the shower... Like, it was ridiculous how everything came back to sex in some way. Thank the stars there weren't actually any detailed descriptions of people doing it. It was just mentioned or referred to.

Some of the plot points were deus ex machinas and a little too easy a coincidence. For example, he was at Chicago's international airport, looking for a woman he needed to interrogate for his investigation. He just happened to find her the moment he got there and she happened to be the car parked right next to him. How in the world... If he'd used magic, I'd believe it. But he literally just drove there, called her, looked in one of the car windows and saw her talking on the phone to him.

There was another scene where he was at the scene of the murder after all the cops had left. He found a film canister under the bed that the police somehow missed when they combed through the room. It wasn't like it was hidden behind some secret panel or anything. It was literally just sitting under the bed, and no cop thought to look inside. The pictures in there held an important clue for the investigation.

So there were some contrived moments for sure.

Some information on background/worldbuilding was given exactly when needed, but they seemed like they were just made-up on the spot to push the plot along. For example, we learned that there was some new drug circulating the streets called ThirdEye, but we only find out about it when Harry's faced with a ThirdEye junkie. And then he's like: "oh, there's this thing called ThirdEye. I investigated it before..."

The White Council comes up randomly too. "Oh yeah there's this white council and I'm on parole for them..."

A lot of these important background things popped up out of the blue in the middle of the book, and it felt very out of place and contrived. Had they been mentioned earlier, then when they became plot-relevant, they wouldn't seem so random. Also, because they came up only at the time they were plot-relevant, Butcher had to do a lot of infodumping to explain it, which dampened the effect. It's like explaining a joke and making it lose it's humor by the time you're done. This kind of background information should've been delivered to us in smaller chucks throughout the first half of the novel, rather than dumped on us at a critcal moment. Then by the time they become plot-relevant, we've had time to process and understand them, so the actual plot becomes our focus and feels more natural and organic, rather than a hastily-constructed plot device to push us forward.

Harry himself is an interesting character. He has kind of that cliche noir voice (is that the noir voice? I dunno if there's a name for it, so I'm calling it the noir voice). But his funny little comments on wizarding stuff made him stand out. He's a manly man/gentleman-type but still a doofus somehow (he was in sweatpants and cowboy boots during the climax, and he didn't hold back on making fun of himself for it), so I quite like him.

The writing was nothing to gawk over in the first half. But during the climax, Butcher's descriptions of the evil magic and creatures and that entire scene-top-class! Wonderfully visceral and emotive and gritty and mysterious. I can see his strength and passion for writing about magic.

Overall, an interesting read. While there were some odd choices Butcher made in terms of plot, everything seemed to fall into place at the end for a phenomenal climax scene. Harry had to fight a giant scorpion monster right before the climax, and he went through hell trying to beat it and nearly died. So during the climax, he now had to deal with SIX of them. fantastic way to up the stakes and tension. The way he beat them, however, felt like he just pulled this spell out of his butt for the occasion. what would've made it truly epic was if he'd used that same spell on a smaller scale at home earlier in the book, so when it comes up again, we're like OH THAT'S SMART.

Still, very cool climax scene, which made this book memorable for me for sure. I heard Butcher gets much better at writing, especially in the later Dresden Files books, so I'll definitely be checking out more of his work. This was a strong debut novel that ended on an epic, memorable note.

3.5 stars