What are the Dresden Files
They are a series of, so far, eighteen books in the urban fantasy genre, written by popular author Jim Butcher.
The series stars Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only official wizard/detective and inveterate smartass. He has a colourful supporting cast including members of the Chicago PD, his skull sidekick Bob, Michael, who is basically a D&D paladin, and his frenemies in the White Council, a worldwide order of magic users.
Dresden gradually becomes involved with the important players of his universe, such as the Faerie Courts, a group of fallen angels possessing humans through Judas Iscariot’s thirty pieces of silver, and a mysterious organization which seems to want to bring about the end of the world.
Sounds like a fun premise! (This overview has spoilers for the whole series. Be warned).
Why the Dresden Files is bad
Most of the series’ flaws are unfortunately embodied in the series’ protagonist, Harry Dresden.
Misogyny is a tradition in noir writing. Raymond Chandler, a fantastic writer, was one of the ones who cemented this, as exemplified in this passage from The Long Goodbye:
All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her.
Modern adaptations tone down the sexism in Chandler’s stories. Butcher instead opted to update it in a rather unfortunate way. Dresden is…well, just read this passage:
I have what might be considered a very out-of-date and chauvinistic attitude about women. I like to treat women like ladies. I like to open doors for them, pay for the meal when I’m on a date, bring glowers, draw out their seat of them- all that sort of thing. I guess I could call it an attitude of chivalry, if I thought more of myself. Whatever you called it, Murphy was a lady in distress. And since I had to put her there, it only seemed right that I should get her out of trouble, too.
-Jim Butcher, Fool Moon.
God damn. I think we’ve all met this species of nerd, although at least he’s not talking about punching women in the face.
There isn’t anything strictly wrong with having a fedora-tipping neckbeard as a protagonist. The problem is that a) Dresden is otherwise presented as a highly moral and caring hero, b) Butcher frames his egregious neckbeardism as him simply caring too much rather than a serious character flaw, c) the narrative is also sexist in weirdly, uncomfortably horny way.
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.
-Jim Butcher, Fool Moon
That’s one of the milder descriptions: almost every female villain is introduced like this. Take Maeve, the Winter Lady’s introduction:
She looked young. Young enough to make a man feel guilty for thinking the wrong thoughts, but old enough to make it difficult not to1. Her hair had been bound into long dreadlocks, each of them dyed in a different shade, ranging from a deep lavender to pale blues to greens to pure white, so that it almost seemed that her hair had been formed from glacial ice…She wore a white t-shirt tight enough to show the tips of her breasts straining against the fabric,2 framing the words OFF WITH HIS HEAD. She had hacked the shirt off at the top of her rib cage, leaving pale flesh exposed, along with a glitter of silver flashing at her navel.
-Jim Butcher3, Summmer Knight
Interlude: an unbiased list of the main female characters in The Dresden Files
Susan: reporter, love interest. Main role is to be sexy, get into danger. Eventually turned into a vampire, later killed.
Lara Wraith: succubus, extremely sexualized. Main role is to hit on Dresden and occasionally do evil things.
Harry’s wizard apprentice Molly: beautiful, has a dark side, extremely sexualized. Main role is to hit on Dresden and occasionally do evil things.
Mab: Harry’s employer, Queen of the Winter Fairie. Extremely sexualized. Main role is to hit on Dresden and occasionally do evil things.
Murphy: abrasive, tough-as-nails female cop, on-again-off-again love interest. Eventually killed, to resounding boos from the fandom.
The Dresden Files has the soul of a comic book (derogatory)
It’s difficult to think of Dresden Files side characters who aren’t more or less the same at the beginning of the series compared to the end.
In Fool Moon, Michael Carpenter, the D&D Paladin previously mentioned, is an upright, moral person who never hesitates to throw himself into danger and has no doubts about his role as essentially, God’s hitman on earth. By Skin Game, Michael Carpenter has developed into an upright, moral person who never hesitates to throw himself into danger and has no doubts about his role as essentially, God’s hitman on earth.
The possible exception is Thomas Raith, Dresden’s Incubus half-brother, who is genuinely conflicted about being a vampire who eats people’s souls, and swings between embracing and fighting it. Unfortunately, Thomas is an inconsistent presence in the books.
The problem with a long-running series with ‘the soul of a comic book,’ as Butcher calls it, is that you need some character development, and it takes skill to make flat characters grow a third dimension.
Unfortunately Butcher prefers to wallow in angst, which is the reason that the later Dresden books are more flawed than the early ones. Probably the worst entry in the series is Changes, one of the most miserable urban fantasy books ever written, which seems to exist purely to torture Dresden and his supporting cast.
Why are these things so popular?
Yes, riding down the main street in Chicago on a zombie tyrannosaurus rex is cool, but…the duster, the staff, the lean, hawk-featured protagonist, the Joss Whedon-style jokes- this is someone’s Mary Sue OC, right?
Why is everyone not embarrassed by this?
Why the Dresden Files is good
I haven’t read the entire Dresden Files series, but I have read a lot, and I sometimes wonder why.
My younger brother owns the first eight books, and I finished all of them before I was twenty. In a place where there wasn’t much to do except wander around the countryside,4 they were a slice of urban American junk food in a very British environment.
For the purposes of this blog, I read two of the series in two days, around 1,000 pages, and I found that pretty easy. Enjoyable, as well. I have also picked several other books from the series up from the library and read them, generally at breakneck speed. I can clearly see all of the problems the series has, but I also can’t help enjoying them on some level.
Butcher is great at the bones of story structure: setting up climaxes and tension and making you want to keep going from page to page. He’s also just funny at times.
The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.
-Jim Butcher, Blood Rites (opening line).
The Dresden Files also has the advantage of being set in supernatural-haunted Chicago. In Butcher’s telling, the city has its own criminal ecosystem separate from the supernatural one, exemplified by the gangster ‘Gentleman’ Johnny Marcone, who alternates between being an ally and a villain in the early books.
It’s an idea which allows him to blend classic noir tropes with essentially any supernatural creature he wants to include.
You’re in America now. Our idea of diplomacy is showing up with a gun in one hand and a sandwich in the other and asking which you’d prefer.
-Jim Butcher, Turn Coat
That brings me to the other big talent Butcher has: worldbuilding. That normally doesn’t replace the ability to tell a good story, but Butcher is unusually good at introducing multiple different iterations or gradients of the same thing in a way which feels natural and tying them all to the central plot.
For example, in Fool Moon, the much-maligned second book5, Dresden investigates a murder which appears to have been committed by werewolves.
He asks Bob- who is a sort of supernatural LLM trapped in a skull- for help solving the crime, only to be told there are no less than four different types of werewolves, including vanilla, demonic, Viking-style berserkers who only channel the spirits of wolves, and a sort of wolf-demigod more powerful than the rest put together. All four types turn out to be relevant to the plot, by the way.
“What kind of potion, and what kind of werewolves?” Bob said, promptly.
I blinked: “there’s more than one?”
…
“We had every kind of werewolf you could think of. Hexenwolves, werewolves, lycanthropes and loupgarou to boot. Every kind of lupine theriomorph you could think of.”
-Jim Butcher, Fool Moon
To a fantasy geek, or any type of geek really, there’s a lot to be said for the ability to build a universe which people are interested in learning more about. JK Rowling, for all her faults as a writer and human being, knew how to do that, and Butcher seems to have the same intuitive ability.
Take, for example, this passage from Dead Beat, my first Dresden Files book. This was the moment which hooked me on the series as a teenager:
Last year in the U.S. alone more than nine hundred thousand people were reported missing and not found…
That’s out of three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in three hundred and twenty-five vanishing. Every year….
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but it’s almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators.
― Jim Butcher, Dead Beat
In a couple of paragraphs, Butcher justifies the entire supernatural ecosystem he has created, full of vampires, trolls and other things which go bump in the night and leaves you wondering whether there could be something picking off the human race from the shadows and we wouldn’t even notice.6
Some book reviews
I choose to re-read one of the consensus best books of the series, the consensus worst book of the series, and one picked at random.7
Consensus best- Dead Beat
Honestly, this is the best Dresden Files book. Butcher can tell a joke and write an action scene, and the world feels big and weird but grounded at the same time. There’s a reason this is often recommended as the first book in the series to read.
Consensus worst- Fool Moon
Better than its reputation would suggest. The writing is fairly basic, but I like the different types of werewolves, and the series is still simple enough to be enjoyable on its own terms.
Random pick- Skin Game
This is a fun supernatural caper about a team of wacky characters trying to break into a vault in Hell8, but unfortunately shows many of the flaws of later entries of the series. The Denarians, the aforementioned Fallen Angels who possess humans on earth, are pretty flat villains, and the pervasive adolescent horniness is distracting. Butcher still has interesting worldbuilding and ideas, which offset this somewhat.
- I feel uncomfortable even copying this sentence ↩︎
- She is a Winter faerie, but I still feel this is too much ↩︎
- Who should be deeply ashamed ↩︎
- I grew up in the countryside, and on two separate occasions my mum has moved to places at least half an hour’s walk from civilization. ↩︎
- I actually consider it one of the better books in the series. ↩︎
- It took seven books and there are a lot of logical objections you could make, but better than Buffy did! ↩︎
- Based on Reddit polls and people I know who are fans, the random book was the only one in the library that day ↩︎
- Technically Hades, but w/e ↩︎
Chris Barker 
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