Storm Front, by Jim Butcher

[rowyn]

I have still been reading. For a while, I was reading graphic novels; maybe I'll do mini-reviews of those, too. Books I've been reading slowly, like one every week or two. But not this one.

No, Storm Front took about four and a half months to finish.

I bought this novel at ConQuesT about ten years ago. Glen Cook was vending books there like he did every year back then, and I asked him for recommendations. He suggested this one. When I got it home, Lut took one look and said, "I've got a copy of that. It's not very good." I stuck it with all the other books and forgot about it, untouched, until this May. When I was going on a trip and looking for something to read on the plane. Lut plied me with a couple of other books when he saw I was resorting to Storm Front, but I cracked it open on the plane anyway.

It didn't irritate me enough to say "This is bad and I'm not finishing it." But it never made me care about anything that happened in it, either.I read a little on the flight out, a little on the flight back, and finally left it at work on the theory of "if I am desperate for something to read on break and have nothing else, I can read this."

It's book one of the Dresden Files, and lots of people love it. I am not entirely sure why I am so unimpressed by it. Part of it is employment of my least favorite trope. "make sure your main character is up against forces massively more powerful than him, against which he stands no chance, with no allies, so that everyone can be super-impressed by his ability to survive." This tactic is highly recommended in some parts of the writing world, where if your character isn't fighting a five-front war with both hands tied behind his back while being tortured, you're going to easy on him. But it takes really kick-ass story-telling skills to pull this off with me, and this book did not have them.

Another factor: it reads rather like an urban fantasy version of 40s noir. The protagonist is an "old-fashioned" guy who treats women like they're a different and incomprehensible species. The women in the book are all damsels in distress -- ALL OF THEM, including the supposedly tough cop character -- who are at best useless if not an active detraction from the protagonist as he rescues them from their various predicaments. Or they get killed, when he's not around to rescue them. There might have been a minor female character that didn't die or get rescued by Dresden, but I forget who if so. (Oh wait, I remember one of the antagonist females survived the book without Dresden's help.) I forget if there were any non-white characters. If there were, probably antagonists because (see trope 1), Dresden has no allies and has to do everything himself.

Anyway, I don't necessarily hate white male power fantasies with abundant helpless gorgeous women to rescue. When it's actual 40s noir I am generally willing to overlook it as a product of its culture. When it's from 2000, I am kind of hoping for a more nuanced view of the world, though. The characters just felt very flat and uninteresting to me. I didn't care about them, or what happened to them, and the over-the-top drama at the climax didn't grip me. I put the book down several times during it, picking it up a day or three later when I didn't have anything else to read.

But if these things do not grate on one, I can easily see enjoying the book. It has other stuff going for it: I like the way Butcher puts in descriptions of scenes and characters, so that you get a sense of what the world looks like to the author instead of conjuring everything up yourself. I was amused by how many characters, male and female, were described as attractive. The central mystery more-or-less works as a mystery, neither too transparent nor too contrived and obscure.

It gets a 5 of 10 for me, though, and was in the category of "barely worth finishing".

Comments

[okojosan.livejournal.com]

I may have this book, and I've heard "good" things about the series. Glen Cook did his own noir detective series, which I liked as a teenager. But I've also heard about this other side of the Dresden files, about the way women are written, and it just makes me kind of tired.

My mom bought a couple of the Dresden books for some reason, then realized they were the middle of the series, so sent them to me, and I may have picked up the two first books but haven't gotten around to reading them yet.

[rowyn]

Yeah, I read Cook's noir-fantasy-detective as a teen and remember it as okay. I have no idea how I'd feel about it now. There are so many books that I don't remember anything beyond whether I liked it at the time, and a lot of the time I feel differently when I re-read.

It just makes me kind of tired.

Exactly. It's like it's not bad enough, or I don't have enough energy left, to get really upset about it. It's just ... "oh yeah this again. Still." *sigh*

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I think I might have liked the first book least of the series.

I found your review interesting, because it made me question why I liked it so much. I think the answer to that is that I came to it straight from other urban fantasy, which was all "tough powerful woman who is also gorgeous, surrounded by gorgeous men, gets to choose between multiple hot preternatural dudes while kicking preternatural tail all on her own. And all the dudes need her help."

After six or seven series' of those, finding a male version was a relief to me. It still is, because urban fantasy is predominantly about female narrators who get hot guys, notice hot guys, rescue hot guys and don't need hot guys.

[rowyn]

*laughs!*

I have not read that much supernatural fantasy, and the ones I have read don't have the female protagonist always getting out of trouble on her own (which is cool! I am fine with women needing to be rescued on occasion!) So it didn't come across as an antidote. But I can see how it could. Hee!

If I didn't have a gigantic reading list already, I might be willing to give the second a try, but eh. Lots of other stuff to read, and Jim Butcher hardly needs my patronage. :)

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

lythandra is very fond of the series; I've only read some short stories featuring Dresden that have appeared in anthologies. From what I've heard of later in the series, it just keeps getting amped further up, although there are better female characters (including a daughter) later. Although it sounds to me it's not that their femaleness is what makes the character useless, so much as the need for Dresden to be the awesome one, maybe? Dunno.

Must... resist... urge... to compare... my book...! ;)

-TG

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Wow, now I'm even less tempted to read it than before. And I had absolutely zero interest before, so that's impressive.

[rowyn]

Yeah, that's fair to say -- it's not like any of the male other characters get to be useful either. Although Harry doesn't need to rescue them all. Really, there's three women in the supporting cast that he has to rescue to one degree or another, and one who dies because he's not around to rescue her, plus the one who dies to initiate the book's mystery. (A man gets killed at the same time, so that bit was gender-balanced). It seemed kind of excessive by the end there.

[rowyn]

I have pushed your disinterest into repulsion territory!

It wasn't horrible, but yeah, I can't say you're missing anything.

[nkcmike.livejournal.com]

I think I read 2 or 3 of the Dresden books, and decided that was enough.

[rowyn]

I think one will be enough for me. -_-

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

I have a few friends who love the series, so I'm kinda relieved finding someone else who doesn't XD

One thing that really bugged me about the first one was what struck me as majorly sloppy worldbuilding - it goes on and on how magic anywhere near tech makes the tech not work, then provides music from a CD player for a ritual? WTF?

When I wondered if I should give another book a try to see if the series gets better, what decided me not to was the bit where Our Protagonist argued that the person who committed the murders was probably an angry woman because they were so gruesome, and women are more nasty then men.

[rowyn]

I did get the sense that Dresden's sexist streak was more Dresden than Butcher necessarily -- case in point: Dresden is wrong in this guess. >:) But there's still plenty of problematic stuff, and yeah, Dresden's powers seemed to be 'whatever's convenient for the author now'. :/

[skyflame.livejournal.com]

Karrin Murphy gets much stronger as a character as the series goes on. There are also some serious bad-ass villains who are women, but they start appearing in books four or five, if I remember correctly.

[sf-reader.livejournal.com]

I was late coming to that series, perhaps 5 years ago, after occasionally seeing Jim Butcher at conventions. (He lives in Independence, MO) I liked it enough to read the rest of the series and to read his high fantasy series which came out about the same time that I first read his work.

While I don't anxiously wait for the next book to come out, it is one of the few series which I get in hardcover, rather than wait for the paperback version to come out.

It is formulaic, but it is a formula which works for me.

[duane-kc.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I've tried to like this series; the author is a close-friend-of-a-close-friend, and I tried several of the first books in the series and was vaguely annoyed by them all. It doesn't help that I'm a better detective than the protagonist is. Your entry here, finally gelled what was going on in the back of my head and articulated what annoyed me most about Harry Dresden; he's a bad knock-off of Mike Hammer. (Who was no great shakes as a detective or an example of humanity himself).

Feh. I'll go back to reading Kat Richardson's Greywalker series instead. Thanks for the boot to the cerebellum, though.

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

Heh. I was not aware of that as a genre convention. (I do keep meaning to pick up the Dresden Files though.)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Yay for a Rowyn post! I know this post was a week or so ago, but the last time I checked LJ, it looked as if it had been broken, and my "Friends" page was completely obliterated, and the "new friends page" incomprehensible. (Or, rather, "incomprehensible in the next-to-nothing amount of time I was willing to spend on trying to learn the ropes of the new version." And since I've got the URL to check the OLD version of the "friends" page memorized, that's not likely to change for me anytime soon.)

Anyway, on to the book: I've heard of Dresden Files before, but never read up on it. Based on what you've said, I think the take on female characters would annoy me as well. NUANCED is what I want these days. I've read stories where every single female character is uber-strong and resourceful and absolutely NOT AT ALL like those other stories (i.e., we hate going North all the time, so we must go South all the time), sometimes with ineffectual male characters thrown in (or none at all!) for good measure, and while the first time or two might be novel, it's not the direction I'd like to see.

In anime, it seems too often that it's either the traditional male fantasy where all females are either damsels-in-distress or femmes-fatale, or simply NOT IMPORTANT ... or else it's the oddball switcheroo where we tell a story that could or quite literally DID originally have male characters, and we simply gender-swapped them to have powerful females. Or, we get "faux action girls." Or we get powerful competent action girls, but there are SEVERAL of them, rather than a single properly-developed heroine, and there's just one "don't you wish you were him?" male-viewpoint-character guy in their life who's the de-facto protagonist of the story even if he doesn't do anything of note.

If I were a real writer (i.e., someone who actually writes something rather than just lamenting about how I really ought to write something someday), I think I'd have trouble trying to figure out the right balance, though. I might "overreact" by focusing too much on what I want to NOT do. I'd probably need to run it by someone else with a different point of view for "gender role checking."

[rowyn]

I need to make my next book one you'll actually like so you can be on the reading filter for it! :) All I've been posting lately is the locked poly-romance installments. Should be finished with it by year-end at least, though.

It's impossible to get the balance to be something everyone will be happy with, of course, and it's hard even to make it reasonably nuanced. I suspect Butcher's work suffers additionally in this respect because of his subscription to the "you can never be TOO HARD on your protagonist!" method of writing. It's not like any of the other male characters are competent or fully-realized, either. Still, Dresden doesn't have to rescue any men and he rescues three women, so I don't think it's ALL in my imagination. :| Micah noted that "opposite", with the women being competent and the men useless, is common in urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

I think the anime trope of the "one average boy that all the girls are stalking" is one of my least favorites. Ugh.

I really do prefer that both male and female characters be, y'know, interesting and well-developed and not necessarily the one needing to be rescued by the other all the time. :/ One of my own personal tropes seems to be "characters alternating rescuing each other" instead. I don't INTEND to do it, it just works out that way somehow.

[rowyn]

I am glad to hear it improves! Even if I am unlikely to read any more just the same. :)

[rowyn]

That's fair enough. I didn't like it myself but that doesn't mean I think no one else can. :D I even can understand why other people would like it! Which is not the case with every book I don't care for. c_c

[rowyn]

Yes, Dresden is very much "noir detective + magic" in flavor. Which I can see people liking, but this one doesn't work for me either. -_-

[rowyn]

I had noticed the prevalence of hot guys in urban fantasy, particularly "hot guys that all want the female protagonist", but them being generally useless without her was less evident to me. I am not sure if this is because I'm not reading the same examples of the genre as Micah or if it's just that I didn't notice. :)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Speaking purely theoretically (as someone who hasn't actually written a complete story), I imagine that one way I might try to tackle the issue would be to try to alternate my point of view, and not get attached to ONE character as "the star." Bonus points if I can have POV characters with opposing agendas, worldviews, etc., and I try to honestly put myself in that character's position, because otherwise I might run into the danger of just having all the viewpoint characters be more-or-less the same character, except that every other chapter the character sports a different name and is in drag.

My most recent readings would be:
* Assorted short stories by Philip K. Dick. Very trippy.
* The "Republic Commando/Imperial Commando" series by Karen Traviss, from the Star Wars "expanded universe" novels.

With certain reservations (I think I've already touched on some of those in previous LJ posts), I think I'd rate Karen Traviss about as highly as Timothy Zahn in terms of Star Wars Expanded Universe writers. I'm not really well-read enough to have an opinion on where to rate them compared to sci-fi in general, and Star Wars is really more "sci-fantasy" or "space opera," with a hefty slice of cheese.

I really need to read some of Traviss's other books. She writes interesting characters of both genders, but I think they AGREE with each other way too much, especially over topics that should be fairly controversial in the Star Wars universe. Especially jarring is just how far off of the "status quo" these characters are in their views of how good/not-good the Jedi (of the Old Republic) are. It would've been nice to have them NOT agree with each other quite so much -- or else introduce some opposing views into our "viewpoint cycle." Only the first book bothered to include an outright villain in the chapter-by-chapter cycle of viewpoints, and he didn't stick around nearly enough to be fleshed out to the point of becoming at all interesting.

I suppose the risk is that if you spend too much time in the head of your villain, you might come to sympathize with him too much. I've read stories where it becomes evident that the author really loves his (or her) villain a lot, sometimes to the point where it feels like the villain's previous offenses are being retconned and explained away (and why exactly ARE the protagonist and antagonist enemies, anyway?). Not that I'm against stories that happen to have an "antagonist" who isn't an outright villain, or a villain who can be redeemed, or even a genuinely nasty villain who nonetheless has "reasons" for his behavior. I think that all can be fascinating as well -- but there are just times when I'm reading a story and I strongly suspect that the writer's resolve has been shaken, and he or she isn't willing to carry through and let the villain STAY a villain, not for the sake of story, but for some sort of emotional writer-creation attachment.

I have favorable memories of Prophecy in this regard, by the way. That was an excellent way to turn the villain-hero model on its head simply by having the world itself be so broken. :)

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

I haven't actually read much of it at all.

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

Possibly, but I tend to like books because I like their protagonists. Books centered around someone I don't like are usually not my cup of tea.

[rowyn]

Same here! :)