The SoapVox

Harry Dresden, Professional Wizard, that’s what the ad in the yellow pages says, announcing the only professional wizard in Chicago.

The Dresden Files is one of the most fun urban fantasy series I’ve read in a long long time. In a world where magic, vampires, werewolfs and faeries exist right among modern civilization, Harry Dresden and his friends get to face all kinds of evils, from wars among the faeries that can destroy the world, to stopping warlocks that do black magic and try to take over the world, and even manage to make you laugh.

The universe that Butcher paints in the nine books that make this series is an interesting and complex one, showing us a world in which not all vampires and not all faeries are on the same team, with intricate politics and personal interactions, and you learn new things about Harry on every book.

So far, the series is made up of:

• Storm Front
• Fool Moon
• Grave Peril
• Summer Knight
• Death Masks
• Blood Rites
• Dead Beat
• Proven Guilty
• White Night

Jim Butcher makes his writing fun and catching, it draws you into the life of all of the characters, and makes you laugh and cry and care with them all, creating people that you’d love to meet and hang out with…hell, I’d love to spend some time at Mac’s drinking some of his famous brews :)

We get to see the changes through Dresden’s life and mind, from being a slightly immature, reckless and impulsive wizard to becoming a more mature, reckless and impulsive wizard :) He learns to appreciate and value his friends, and, more important in this case, to trust them and teach them how to be prepared, so they are able to actually help him get through the troubles, big and small, that visit him on every book.

Among all the characters created by Jim, my favourite (after Harry) is probably the tiny Murphy, a police detective in the Chitown PD and friend of Harry, goes from being a great cop who has to handle the bizarre cases that pop up in the Special Investigations Department to a very able helper for Dresden in the hard battles that he has to fight to keep Chicago and the world in balance. Oh, did I mention that she’s a five-foot-nothing girl who also happens to be the most lethal in hand-to-hand combat of the whole PD? :)

There’s also the bad guys, with the vampires taking pride of place.

White Court, Red Court and Black Court vampires are the most prominent in the story, tho other courts are mentioned at times.

The Black Court vampires are, as Dresden informs us, the ones that Bram Stocker wrote about, beings with extraordinary abilities, but also with extraordinary weaknesses, like their susceptibility to garlic, stakes, holy water and, of course, sunlight.

The Red Court, on the other hand, are bat-like monsters hidden under flesh masks that make it possible for them to pass for humans, and they are almost as strong as the Black Court, with much less of their weaknesses.

Both the Red and Black Court vampires live off blood, preferably human, preferably while said human is still alive.

And then there’s the White Court vampires…these are not as strong, fast and…inhuman as the other two kinds, but they are still strong and fast…and probably smarter. They live off the life essence of humans, not off blood, but off emotion. They seduce or scare or torture their victims, feeding off the pleasure, fear or pain that the poor humans feel (there’s 3 distinct emotional vampire sets, one set feeds of each different emotion). The White Court has the advantage, on the other hand, of not fearing the sun nor garlic, and being able of passing off as humans with ease.

Getting to know all the different kinds of creatures, both good and bad and morally indifferent, is part of what makes this series so much fun; a complex reality in which our hero has to view life from all angles to be able to reach the right decision, saving his friends, his city and his world.

Go buy the books, they are worth reading and re-reading :)

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Tags: Books, Reviews

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