Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
Mar. 5th, 2007 11:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katharosSo a friend of mine has been lending me the Dresden Files series - up to number five now, Summer Knight. They're tales about Harry Dresden - only wizard in the phone book -who runs a detective-type agency and the various trouble he gets into among the supernatural community. Very Urban Fantasy meets Hard-boiled detective fiction, complete with first person narrator. And that's where they fall down for me - great concept, poor execution.
I find them very uncomfortable reads - not in a profound way but simply that they seem very schizophrenic, as if the writer wanted to have it both ways. So Harry's narrative reads like a hard-boiled noir detective full of cycnicism, one liners, sarcasm and a heavy dose of machismo, while he acts like a great big woobie or candidate for whumping victim of the year. And the parts where woobie consequences for the painful emotional and/or physical torture meets hard-boiled macho-man narrative are painful to say the least. The styles just can't work together, at least not in the hands of this writer.
That's not to say I won't keep borrowing them as long as my friend is willing to lend them to me - they're good quick fun reads. But I'll be skimming and skipping along rather than lingering, and I'm not going to be spending money on them.
I find them very uncomfortable reads - not in a profound way but simply that they seem very schizophrenic, as if the writer wanted to have it both ways. So Harry's narrative reads like a hard-boiled noir detective full of cycnicism, one liners, sarcasm and a heavy dose of machismo, while he acts like a great big woobie or candidate for whumping victim of the year. And the parts where woobie consequences for the painful emotional and/or physical torture meets hard-boiled macho-man narrative are painful to say the least. The styles just can't work together, at least not in the hands of this writer.
That's not to say I won't keep borrowing them as long as my friend is willing to lend them to me - they're good quick fun reads. But I'll be skimming and skipping along rather than lingering, and I'm not going to be spending money on them.
