Book Review: Storm Front

When I first heard about SciFi’s new series, The Dresden Files, my first thought was, “Oh, look, someone’s decided to rip off John Constantine, Hellblazer. I hope it’s halfway decent.” Imagine my surprise to discover that (a) the series was based on a series of books, and (b) the series started in 2000, long before the 2005 movie Constantine. Which isn’t to say that the latter didn’t add to SciFi’s decision to make a TV series of the former, but I just wanted to set the record straight.

Storm Front by Jim Butcher (2000)

Overall		Story
Re-Readability		Characters

Jim Butcher’s first installment of the tales of Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, the only wizard in the phone book in Chicago (or pretty much anywhere) introduces the protagonist, the complicated worlds he lives in, and bits and pieces of his backstory, all revealed as he gets deeper and deeper into more and more dire trouble.

Characters: If Harry Potter got kicked out of Hogwarts and decided to become Jim Rockford, you’d have a good taste of Harry Dresden. Wizard with a heart of gold and an overdue rent, mistrusted by the White Council for having sorcerously killed his mentor, Harry’s the only magic-user in the phone book, the person people call when untoward things happen. Oh, and he’s a consultant for the Chicago cops.

Besides Harry, we get introduced to a number of probable “regulars” — Murphy, the Chicago cop saddled with paranormal investigations, and Bob, the air elemental who lives in a skull in Harry’s workshop. Oh, and Morgan, the White Council enforcer who spends most of the book telling Harry how he’s finally gotten the evidence necessary to lop off his head. There’s also a master vampiress and a big shot mobster.

If I mentioned that during the book all of the above, with the possible exception of Bob, but with the addition of a Very Bad Wizard, and other nasty types, want Harry either dead or imprisoned or both, it will give you an idea of the general action that goes on.

Harry is pretty well sketched out — not fabulously, but I felt comfortable running around in his first-person head. The others are decently, if sketchily, drawn. Nobody comes off as too cartoony, if not terribly sophisticated or insightful, either.

Story: Harry’s got two cases dropped in his lap — a woman whose husband is missing, possibly getting involved in … magic stuff. At the same time, the police are calling him in for an extremely grisly and magically impossible double-murder. As Harry proceeds, the mob wants him to butt out, a vampire think’s he’s the murderer of her associate, and his White Council parole officer is calling the higher-ups into town to okay his execution for doing the murder, too. Then things get difficult and dangerous …

Butcher handles the whole “magic” thing well. There are clearly rules (even if some of them show up only at the last moment), various creatures and origins for them, and powers and abilities that Harry has that are broad enough to be interesting, but not so much so as to feel like a cheat.

That said, It’s a little hard to get a handle on Harry Dresden’s world. Butcher throws a lot of information, and Harry pulls a lot of stuff out of his proverbial hat — not quite deus ex machina, but pretty close. It’s not unusual with a first novel, in general or in a series, to go into overdrive with backstory and exploring all the nooks and crannies of the complex world, prior to the point where the reader can expect (from previous volumes) what sorts of options are on the table. What folks in the world know about magic and the mystic seems a bit fuzzy. Stuff Happens, but most people Don’t Believe It. But some do. Sort of. The police investigate these things. Or, rather, things that are weird. But they don’t really believe it’s real. Except they investigate it.

Re-Readability: Yeah, I’ll be loaning this out and rereading it in the future. Very tasty popcorn.

Overall: The obvious question (beyond whether it was any good) is the extent to which the book and the TV series compare. They are two sorta-different beasts. The TV series is a bit smaller in scale, the whole Council thread seems different, the powers (and fx) are scaled down, Bob’s very different … it’s sort of … well … like a TV series made from a list of names and one-sentence descriptions. Both are good, both bear a resemblance to each other, and folkswho like one will probably like the other — but they’re not the same.

Bottom line, re the book: I’ve ordered the next three books from Amazon. I’ve heard the series gets better, which is good news, since it’s pretty decent to begin with.