Small Favor
Jim Butcher’s DRESDEN FILES is a series I want to love, yet so far like to varying degrees. SMALL FAVOR, the 10th and latest adventure featuring freelance P.I./wizard Harry Dresden, falls short of the level of fun sustained by the past few installments, yet ironically, has delivered the franchise’s biggest commercial punch in its list-topping debut.
With Chicago under heavy snow that builds to blizzard conditions, the novel begins with Dresden under attack by “weregoats” – not a bad way to grab a reader’s attention. Emerging unscathed, he soon is “hired” by Mab, the faerie-queen villainess of Winter Court for a job he doesn’t want, but as the title has it, he owes her.
Mab asks Dresden to locate one Johnnie Marcone, a local criminal underworld baron who’s vanished in a some sort of massive, pentagram power surge that left the mobster’s building sheared in half, and with an open portal to “the Nevernever.” In contrast to previous novels, this is as mystery-oriented as the plot gets, so that it doesn’t qualify as one at all.
As Dresden’s pals of the past are reintroduced one by one – there’s Bob the talking skull and Dresden’s vampiric half-brother Thomas, to name just two – our hero encounters a giant praying mantis demon, fallen angels trapped in coins and even a gutted Marcone minion putting her intestines back in with Super Glue. There are a couple of great set pieces – one in an aquarium, and one in which Union Station becomes a battleground with sword- and ax-wielding baboon-esque creatures – during which the intrepid wizard whips out his wind spells and such.
Eventually, this leads to an all-out magic war, but only after several players enter our periphery; many come from earlier books, and Butcher assumes too readily that you’re familiar with them and their histories. (Personally, I have a tough time just keeping the series’ ongoing Red Court/White Council skirmish straight each year a new installment rolls around.)
Butcher’s best trick is to infuse Dresden with a breezy wit (”The shelves were covered with an enormous variety of containers … to a leather pouch made from the genital sac of, I kid you not, an actual African lion. It was a gift. Don’t ask”), making the wizard’s head a fun one to hang out in for 400 pages. Two dozen too many utterances of “Hell’s bells” and a lone “Talk to the hand” notwithstanding, his snark carries you through the stretches in the narrative in which nothing happens. There are many; SMALL FAVOR is paced to where the plot jumps from point A to point B to point C, then ambles from points D through P, before deciding to resume leaping for the remainder.
It could benefit from tighter editing. (Minor, but indicative, is that three times within three pages in the first chapter, the same kids are identified after their names as “the youngest children.”) Butcher is all about having a blast in these fantasy/detective romps – as references to everything from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK to ARMY OF DARKNESS attest – but SMALL FAVOR delivers a comparatively less powerful jolt than its immediate predecessors. There’s still a jolt, mind you, but it comes without the euphoric jitters. –Rod Lott
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• PROVEN GUILTY by Jim Butcher
• SPIDER-MAN: THE DARKEST HOURS by Jim Butcher
• WHITE NIGHT by Jim Butcher
I’ve always like the books as well, but I think that they’re a little fluffy, plot wise, as if he knows that there’s a series of books going on and parcels out the plot in carefully measured doses.
Was reassured in reading both the review and RP’s comment … that the books are a little light. Here I was fearing it was mere jealousy.
I like the Dresden Files books, but haven’t read Small Favor yet. Unlike most series that start strong and get weaker with each installment, I think these have started weak and have gotten stronger as time goes on.
I still prefer Simon R. Greene’s Nightside series for wit and characters, but I still keep up with Harry Dresden.
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