Gandalf the Urban: Jim Butcher's Terrible 'Dresden Files'

It's rare to discover that a novel was spawned by the the same mentality that one might devise for a dismissive straw man argument, but Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files manage to be so comprehensively conventional that even their conception seems born of the worst kind of stereotype. From the author himself (bold emphases mine):

The first several books I wrote were nothing but swords and horses. I had been discussing things with my writing teacher every semester and I had written several very mediocre books. At some point she had told me "You know, Jim, you're always going on about how much you enjoy these Anita Blake books by Laurell K. Hamilton and how much you like Buffy, why aren’t you writing something similar to that because that would seem to be a much better use of your interests to serve your writing?" I said "No, I'm a fantasy writer" and I'd done that for a long time. Finally, one semester, I had been arguing with her on several different points on writing craft and so on, and I finally decided that this semester I'm going to do just exactly everything she tells me to and I'm going to show her how wrong she is about all these different things because I had my English Literature degree so I knew better than she did. Just because she had 30 or 40 novels under her belt, that didn't mean she knew anything. So kind of to prove her wrong, I set out to fill out all the little worksheets she had in her class, and proceed according to things she had suggested for new writers to do and I was going to show her what terrible unimaginative pablum was the result... and I wrote the first book of The Dresden Files. I wrote it to prove how much my writing teacher didn't know and learned a valuable lesson about humility as a result.

She read the first three chapters of the very first book and she looked up at me and said "You did it. This will sell." I said "What?"

The average reader of his first novel, Storm Front, probably has the same reaction. He's an orcs-and-hobbits fantasy writer repurposed to riff off another fantasy writer who's repurposing crime procedurals for the fantasy genre. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Butcher has an excess of praise for other authors and genres. He's taken Laurell K. Hamilton's crime thrillers away from the Marshal Service and toward private detectives; in the process, he's crafted a retread of every detective motif, glossed it with some Tolkein and filled it with the sort of flourishes that belong in a writers' workshop. He succeeds in every way but competent writing.

Storm Front follows wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden, a duster-clad, tall and thin man whose use of white magic is available for hire to any citizen who can't get results via conventional means. He also consults for the Chicago PD about cases that cannot be explained by natural causes. In the midst of working on a private case and one on PD consult, Dresden becomes embroiled in a mafia-related drug war, the vengeful motives of a vampire brothel owner, the doubts of police and his potential execution at the hands of a minder assigned to him by a wizard-run court. Not to mention that women coo at him lustily.

It seems interesting until you realize, a few chapters in, that it's basically Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler projected through a Laurell K. Hamilton lens — only it stars Gandalf as the gumshoe. He's tall; he carries a staff of wood that controls his wizard powers; he walks a lot. His jokes are bad. In Tolkein, the jokes come from the author's humorless dedication to immersing the audience in his involved environment. In The Dresden Files, Butcher, despite the privilege of penning the set-up lines before his own punchlines, is simply not funny.

Unclever people aren't, and this is the sort of book unclever people write. Butcher has little trouble imagining the worlds of vampires and faeries and wizards but his book exhibits little demonstrable knowledge of human beings. The main character, Harry Dresden, presumably the one with which he shares the most emotional connection, almost qualifies as an Asperger's case. He lives in a basement and talks to a skull that has more of a sex drive than he does. He doesn't have any friends or family — although the latter, not the former, is incidentally dismissed. His strongest relationship is with a bartender who doesn't actually make sounds that resemble words while providing him a food service routinized and paid for.

He doesn't understand girls. He acts like a deferential and gesturally-prone gentlemen toward them, but within about 25 pages, he opines about how "witches" are capable of being more evil, emotional and damaging than wizards. It's exactly the sort of paternalistic misogyny that extenuates from a mind unable to cope with human beings possessing different agendas — one that thus assigns them a courtly role, whereupon they can be incorporated within a ritualized context that precludes their being people and instead makes them moveable pieces within a graphical human framework. Men are, like, Y, but women... they're the X factor. And bitchy.

Jim Butcher writes about people as if they're theory, and it's a theory drawn from a mind unfamiliar with non-mathemagical complexity. Paradoxically, his paranormal universe seems fairly normal, and it's the real world that feels like it's been written mostly through conjecture. Usually this kind of situation calls for a look at where the main character/author relationship breaks down, but it's tough to see much of a divide between Butcher/Dresden. Butcher kept writing his books the way he wanted to, thinking that they would succeed. To spite someone who told him that his writing was bad, he tried to follow the rules of writing and then stumbled into improvement. He was literally surprised by this. Then, even though his book didn't get published, he determinedly wrote two sequels to it anyway, immersing himself in a universe that had garnered only token approval if not outright disinterest. Then he sneaked into book conventions and shadowed authors until someone paid attention to him and, ultimately, his book. Even in Butcher's real-life narrative, the real world was mostly an inconvenience and irrelevancy that could be got round sooner or later.

Meanwhile, he writes about a main character with four names and a giant cat, and in real life he has a giant dog with four names. He knows a lot of martial arts and has a haircut that shouldn't have escaped 1990, back when wearing giant-ass overcoats and long hair was last non-comical to anyone. His main character wears a giant-ass overcoat everywhere and has long hair, but aside from one or two comments about them, he's assumed to be a cool and capable guy.

Butcher's interview writing shows that he has a suitably deferential shame about himself, at least early on, but it's that kind of pro forma patter that says, "I'm not very good" while the rest of the text says, "I rule." Fittingly, his main character spends most of Storm Front getting his ass kicked to further the plot, but as soon as his obstacles seem to be overwhelming, he starts declaiming the weakness of those challenging him, taking comfort in his own unknown reserves of crafted and expert power. In short: "I'm no good. You think that, because I've let you and because you lack vision. Ahahaha. I'm actually really good. Rad as shit, in fact." Maybe in subsequent books, HarryJim will tap into The Matrix.

That aping choice would not be surprising, because adhering to formula informs Butcher's characters' reasons for being far more than his writing does. Formula is much on display, to the extent that it defines the drama better than any sudden omniscience Butcher can over-adverbially offer. Consider the template for your hard-boiled detective noir:

• Cash-strapped detective takes a case.
• Case comes from a distraught woman.
• Detective accidentally comes upon another crime.
• Has a perfect relationship with a secretary, but he will never see that, because he's too focused on the case, and anyway, she'll never understand him.
• Is pursued by a woman who really wants him for some reason.
• Someone in the press is too curious about what he's doing.
• Some authority figure blames him irrationally for some evil he clearly didn't commit.
• A powerful crime boss gives him an indulgence... or does he?
• The women interested in him meet or come to blows somehow.
• He gets the shit kicked out of him by everyone.
• For reasons that don't make sense, he won't tell anyone everything he knows.
• The scared woman he met at the beginning of the book knew more about his case than he did.
• It turns out his two cases were connected.

Give or take a line or two, most of these could be Chandler plots. Add a wife and a dog, and it could be any iteration of The Thin Man. But let's take a look at Storm Front:

• Cash-strapped wizard takes a case.
• Case comes from a distraught woman. (But she's afraid of wizards.)
• Wizard comes upon another crime, this time bidden by the woman he has...
• ...a perfect relationship with. Not a secretary but a cop. But he will never see that, because he's too focused on the case and on trying to be professional, and anyway, she'll never understand him because he's a wizard.
• Is pursued by a woman who really wants him for some reason. (Journalist.)
• Someone in the press is too curious about what he's doing. (The same woman who wants him for some reason.)
• Some authority figure blames him irrationally for some evil he clearly didn't commit. (The wizard Morgan.)
• A powerful crime boss gives him an indulgence... or does he?
• The women interested in him meet or come to blows somehow. (Ambiguous: BUT there's a scene where he's concussed and being taken care of by the cop, while he's expecting to meet up with a voluptuous witness, and the cop answers the phone and says "wrong number" before he goes to sleep and wakes up to find the hot journalist expecting a date.)
• He gets the shit kicked out of him by everyone.
• For reasons that don't make sense, he won't tell anyone everything he knows.
• The scared woman he met at the beginning of the book knew more about his case than he did.
• It turns out his two cases were connected.

Strip out the Gandalf, Chandler and Hamilton, and you're left with nothing, just a skeleton of other plots and formulae on which Butcher has hung nothing new. This probably doesn't bother most fantasy fans, because it doesn't really matter if all the elements are derivative and predictable so long as they're mashed up in a new way. After all, we're talking about a fanbase that has large overlap with the people who love it when fake pirates rap to old Nintendo game themes.

Why formulaic writing and mash-up sensibility doesn't trouble the sci-fi/fantasy readership gnawed at me for a couple days. This last weekend, I got together with a friend who used to read fantasy as a teenager, and I brought up my questions and mentioned that this series sells extremely well. From there, the discussion turned toward what I've always felt is the essential fallacy of sci-fi/fantasy writing, to which he added a critical initial fallacy that I think rounds out my thoughts on how it's received by the fanbase. To wit:

1. Anything that has not been done before will probably be deemed a good book simply because it hasn't been done before.
2. The quality of a book's writing is indivisible from and probably synonymous with whether the story was entertaining, a factor strongly influenced by point number one.

Metrics like this omit anything about the author's style, his ear for dialogue, the efficacy of his expository text, his imagery or the strength of characters and boil all books down to, "Was it enjoyable?" And while there's certainly no shame in experiencing things on this level, it's a terrible way of evaluating much beyond story. It reduces literature to something like fast food — i.e., "Was it good while I was having it?" Essentially the same critical process that makes Jim Butcher "good" is what makes a fast-food hamburger amazing because it has a shitload of bacon on it. The ingredients, the fatal number of fats and oils and carbs, the cheap meat, the wilted or nonexistent vegetables, all these are secondary to whether the thing was salty, bacony and burgerlike.

Now, there's a school of thought that most sci-fi/fantasy fans use the originality/fun-story rubrics because they're smart enough to realize that going any deeper is going to lead to disappointment. To continue the burger analogy, it's like having a preference among the Big Mac, the Whopper and the Wendy's Big Classic. Look, you know they're all mostly garbage, but that doesn't stop you from thinking one sucks the least of the three. In this case, savvy fans realize that any serious examination of a book will only highlight things they know are objectively clunky and ill-crafted. But, hey, they like orcs and people with swords and magic powers, and where else are they going to get this stuff? The books cramming the shelves in this genre will mostly not be deftly styled studies of human nature written through the perspective of someone who wastes demons, but there aren't any alternatives.

I sympathize; I used to be one of these guys. When I was younger, I liked Star Trek a lot. Star Trek books are mostly garbage. But I could go to a used bookstore and buy 20 for $10 and read all of them in less than three weeks, be entertained by characters I liked and feel that I'd accomplished something by blasting through 20 books in no time. If I went to visit family anywhere for a long stretch, there were always local libraries that had a ton of the books, and they always at least had a few I hadn't read yet. But if at any point I'd stopped to break down the prose seriously, I would have ruined my fun. Best to shut the brain off and just roll with it.

While the optimist in me wants to adopt this attitude toward the reception of books like Butcher's and other fantasy authors', I can't. I've spent pages and pages on multiple message boards arguing with hundreds of different fans, and it's hard to walk away without the impression that, after a certain age, these people cleave to these books because they're in a permanent state of arrested development. Half the time, all you need is a picture of the posters involved for all the (negative but all too often true) stereotypes to fall into place — unattractiveness, obesity, absence of popularity, dead-end job, ambition struck down early. Suddenly the fact that their favorite books are about otherwise unremarkable or outcast young men who discover that they have special gifts that can literally save civilization makes sense. I even work with a guy who's a paid reviewer of fantasy novels, a grown man and a parent, and he looks exactly like you'd expect him to look: like Scott Ian of Anthrax LARPing as Grigory Rasputin. His public profile picture is in black and white. He's wearing all black and making a constipated "metal" face. I literally can't remember the last time he engaged a topic that had any bearing on anything that exists in reality at all.

Wish fulfillment then goes some way to explaining the popularity of badly written fantasy books. Nobody really needs three-dimensional supporting casts if they're reading to experience themselves as the main character. The main character himself can be something of a human cipher anyway: establishing him as a full-fledged human being only prevents readers from inserting the things they like about themselves into the text to become the things they like about the character. The emptier he is, probably the better the reading experience will be anyway, since he's meant to be a vessel for the thwarted desires of the readership. The wide appeal of a Mary Sue character like Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden thus explains itself. Beyond being Butcher's own Mary Sue, as said above, beyond being the creation of an author who looks like an avatar of his fanbase — metal hair, self-serious authorial chin-on-fist pose, elevated Spock eyebrow that's probably supposed to look insouciant but mainly makes him look like a giant dorkass — is the fact that Harry Dresden works as a universal Mary Sue. He's so accessibly and pristinely not there that anyone can plug into him and play Gandalf of the Great Lakes.

This degree of emotional/personal investment is just as well because, as said, it obscures clunky or poor prose, and Storm Front has a surfeit of it. Butcher's met few milquetoast verbs he's unwilling to surround with a couple adverbs as traveling companions, and he enjoys showing and telling. There are many "Number One" rules in writing, but the one most commonly expressed seems to be show, don't tell. Butcher seems to think that doing both makes paragraphs twice as good. For instance:

She came into the room like a candle burning with a cold, clear flame. Her hair was a burnished shade of auburn that was too dark to cast back any ruddy highlights but did anyway. Her eyes were dark, clear, her complexion flawlessly smooth and elegantly graced with cosmetics. She was not a tall woman, but shapely, wearing a black dress with a plunging neckline and a slash in one side that showed off a generous portion of pale thigh. Black gloves covered her hands to above the elbows, and her three-hundred dollar shoes were a study in high-heeled torture devices. She looked too good to be true. (109)

First off, the whole thing reads like he'd written too many pages of exposition in a row and went back and told himself he had to insert a paragraph that was "all arty and shit." It doesn't so much try too hard as it does gruntingly labor. Every sentence in it is bad, but some are worse than others. She comes in like a cold-burning flame, which I suppose is different from sliding across the floor like it's hot-as-fuck ice or tumbling down the stairs like liquid gravel. He's just throwing out a sophisticated-sounding juxtaposition that means nothing. To make her seem otherwordly — this woman is a vampire — he describes her hair in copout language as being a polished red that isn't red but is red anyway. Spooky. There's no reason to go for this eerie supernatural flourish if, a few sentences later, you describe her as having such messed-up hands that her gloves cover them "to above the elbows." Granted, that's merely an error, but in case anyone was in doubt that this passage was in the hands of a poor craftsman, they reach the end of five sentences describing a woman as preternaturally gorgeous only to be told, "She looked too good to be true." Jim Butcher writes a paragraph like a fumbled football in the night air. He piles words together like a mistake built on an error and corniced with poopiness. He is a bad writer.

Passages like this thud in the middle of pages so frequently that I gave up making any note of them. At first, I dog-eared any page that had something unintentionally funny printed on it, but I stopped about 100 pages in when I realized that the folded-down pages made the top half of my book a half-inch taller than the bottom half. Still, enough jumped out that I made note of a few:

"They were having sex," I said.

"No," he snapped. "They was playing canasta. Yeah, sex. The real thing, not fake stuff on a set. The real thing don't look as good. Linda, some other woman, three men. I shot my roll and got out."

I grinned, but he didn't seem to have noticed the double entendre. You just don't get quality lowlife often enough anymore." (236)

Nevermind that "I shot my roll" isn't a sexual expression and is, at best, a very weak reach. As said, Butcher is not a funny person. There are a few jokes like this in the book, and they're all groaningly horrible. Under normal circumstances, a fundamental rule of writing is that those who are not funny should not try to be. There's really no excuse for bad jokes in literature when you have control of both the setup and the payoff. An author doesn't have to worry about timing and delivery, because beats and pitch don't really come through in text. The joke just has to be decent, and he has no excuse for failing to pay off what he chooses to establish. As it is, the multitude of other writing sins subsumes this one in Butcher's book, rendering it less glaring. Here the joke's badness gets obscured by the fact that, evidently at his wit's end for something like a different sounding character, Butcher's made himself some sort of clown version of a streetwise guy. At this point, it's so embarrassing he should have gone whole hog with the guy and written him in dialect: "No, dey was playinz Monopoly. 'Course dey woz screwink! Dis woz da woik dey wanteds me ta do for dem. He woz givin 'er da buziness real hot-like. Shaddap goddamn fuhgedaboudit goes back ta Joisy GO METS STERN RULZ BABABOOEY."

The book's standout passage comes near the end, as Dresden is about to confront a dark wizard and is trying to get a handle on the dangers he faces:

So I opened my Third Eye.

How can I explain what a wizard sees? It isn't something that lends itself readily to description. Describing something helps to define it, to give it limits, to set guardrails of understanding around it. Wizards have had the Sight since time began, and they still don't understand how it works, why it does what it does. (288)

Woe betide he who drives the freeway of consciousness without guardrails of understanding. To be fair to Butcher, he uses the subsequent paragraph to try to describe the wizard's "Sight," and it's not especially worse than the rest of the book. This passage, though, represents a neat summary of what he has to offer.

Somerset Maugham wasn't a great writer. In fact, he perhaps generously described himself as in "the very first row of the second-raters." What he was good at was equivocation and embarrassment to put his ideas and feelings out on display. His narrators exhibited a kind of sophisticated reticence that were as much windows into himself as they were artful tools meant to elide his weaknesses. Put simply, he usually wrote well-spoken but incomplete people, shades of himself in different circumstances. Because he often struggled to differentiate the voices he wrote, he would have the narrator recount a long story told to him by another character, putting their interactions into his voice and making his inability to create another whole person work in service of the perspective of the narrator. The Razor's Edge can be seen as something of a collection of instances of his most famous rhetorical stroke: before gamely trying to describe something beyond his experience, he apologizes to the reader for his profound inability to understand.

With Maugham, this personal failure serves the narrative structure, which invariably involves people incapable of connecting with each other. His shortcoming thematically underscores the pity of human relationship. Butcher, on the other hand, writes like a third-rate Maugham, offering the aw-shucks apology as prequel for not getting what he himself can have no excuse for not getting. Whereas Maugham's narrators couldn't possibly enter the minds of others and fully disclose what lay there, Butcher's Dresden stumbles over his own direct experience and somewhat pitifully forfeits an understanding of what it is he supposedly capably taps into on a regular basis.

Put simply, this mystical realm conceptually underpins the entire universe Butcher has created — it is the point of origin and return for the mythology he's attempting to establish — yet he begs off the task of giving it anything like depth. The only thing that makes Harry Dresden unique or worth reading about is magic, and yet at the most critical point in the story, he has to frontload his description of it by telling you he's just as hapless as his reader. Given that this is the denouement, that we've flitted around magic throughout the book but never really gotten into it, the stylistic choice is poor and unsatisfying. It's like reading a book about a quarterback who periodically explains football drills and what a defensive scheme is, reaches the last chapter when the big game starts and says, "Unfortunately, no one can really tell you what a 'forward pass' is...." The effect is hacky and lazy, but then again, so is the ending and every other part of the book.

It doesn't and shouldn't have to be this way. Any book about wizards and vampires should probably be entertaining without too much effort because wizards and vampires do cool stuff. In fact, this book can be pretty entertaining if you're willing to completely shut your brain off. (Do you like to get drunk while reading? This might be a perfect book for that.) Its main problems extend from the fact that you have to do this. If your criterion for a book's being good is that it has a story you have not read in exactly this form before, it's probably satisfying. If being entertained because you don't know what comes next is all you require, then it will succeed for you.

However, any kind of critical approach, even a laconic unintentional one, will destroy your reading experience. It's a unique story in that this specific story has not literally been already spelled out somewhere else, but beyond the surface changes, it's one or two fantasy tropes slapped on any number of instantly familiar hard-boiled detective stories. It's the same wish-fulfillment elements found in thousands of other fantasy novels, with a thin main character you can plug yourself into for instant personal escapism. But most memorably, it's terrible, terrible writing.

The author of this book literally adopted the baseline demands of mainstream storytelling purely to spite an instructor and prove to her the idiocy of her demands on a writing class and then was stunned to have blunderingly achieved basic competency. There is perhaps only one greater testament to the quality of this book than the fact that its having any flabbergasted the writer, when he thought all these things that people expect from books were just idiotic inventions for people who can't deal with awesome stories about swords. That is that, despite his efforts, he still came up short. Telling trumps showing time and again. When in doubt, Butcher does both, perhaps afraid you won't get it. He overwhelms verbs with adverbs and prefaces nouns with enough adjectives to stun even a fulminating emcee about to introduce a keynote speaker. You could tear out any random sequence of pages and have a lesson plan for a writing workshop about what not to do.

That is, if you dare try it, knowing that this book was penned by an arched-eyebrowed suburban ninja perhaps all too ready to brush away his metal locks, put on his bigass vengeance-overcoat and reach for his katanas.


Rating: 1
Probably the perfect airplane novel for people who have to take lots of drugs to be on a plane. Decent library novel if you like sitting down with a large amount of booze and blitzing through a fluff book in a mindset where it doesn't matter if you can remember it the next morning. For anyone looking for a book version of Buffy or a hip update of vampire or wizard lore, it can be a satisfying story, but probably not something you'd feel great laying out cash for. Not recommended for purchase. Not recommended for gifts. Not really recommended.