He Puts The "Ick" In "Magic"

A good light read is hard to come by, because too many authors have a bad habit of equating "light" with "brainless". Alan Dean Foster does the light read nicely; Lost and Found, for example. My new favourite discovery for some good old-fashioned, high-quality fun? Jim Butcher's Dresden Files.

A noir detective story set in contemporary Chicago, this first-person series follows one Harry Dresden, the only professional wizard in North America. You can find him in the Yellow Pages under "wizards". He mostly puts his skills to work as a private investigator, finding missing objects and persons and the like, but every so often consults for the Chicago PD's Special Investigations unit. SI are the folks who get stuck investigating those wierd homicides and disappearances that have no rational explanation, and then explaining them to the city, and the unit is populated with cops who have fallen out of favour with city councilmen, the rest of the force, etc. Harry has one ally on the force, SI's head Lt. Murphy, who works as a character because she's one step - but only one step - away from those uber-irritating "you go grrrrrrrrl!" caricatures, and she plays a nice Scully to Harry's Mulder. This is not to say that Harry is anything like Fox Mulder; for one thing, he's a fun guy. For another, he knows for a fact that the supernatural exists. A member of the governing magic regulatory body, the White Council of Wizards, Harry's a black sheep. Orphaned at six, he was raised and mentored by a wizard who turned out (shocker!) to be evil, and wound up killing his mentor in a fight. You can imagine this had an effect on how he does things like relate to people. Harry's a wiseass through and through, with a sense of humour that may or may not be healthy (but is always entertaining), and is understandably reluctant about things like friendship and bonding. He hangs out as much as he can with Murphy, but otherwise, his only constants are his gigantic cat, Mister, and Bob the Skull, a spirit of intellect who keeps form in, um, a human skull.

Butcher has a nice mythology of wizards and the supernatural, and draws heavily from classic and contemporary sources as well as what must have been a strong Christian upbringing that he appears to have strayed from, but does not resent. For one thing, wizards and the magics that surround them tend to screw up technology, and as such, most wizards are one to three centuries behind the rest of the world - Harry needs Bob to serve as his computer, because computers tend to spontaneously blow out in his presence, and he uses an icebox and cooks on a wood stove. For another, his mythology of faeries is Old World just great. As well, Butcher respects the supernatural in a way most writers of supernatural fiction don't. Creatures like vampires, werewolves, demons, etc. are, in every way, disgusting, evil, and just plain wrong - there is absolutely nothing cool about them in Butcher's universe. On top of that, he also respects the other side of the supernatural battle, another thing most writers of supernatural fiction don't do. Harry's only reliable, constant human friend, besides Murphy, is a man named Michael Carpenter, who is one of the world's three Knights of the Cross. Chosen by God to intervene in certain supernatural battles on Earth, Michael doesn't have a shady past, or some horrible sins he's trying to atone for. When wizards look into people's eyes, the initiate soulgazes, which allow them to literally see the condition and truth of the other person's soul, and is reciprocal, which are two reasons why Harry doesn't look a lot of people in the eyes. When Michael and Harry meet for the first time, Michael insists on a soulgaze...and Harry weeps, because Michael's soul is so beautiful, and Harry wishes his soul were like that.

Butcher also has a great sense of humour that I'm completely in step with. The Dresden Files are The Maltese Falcon meets Angel meets the classic noir writers like Hammett and Sinclair, infused with the soul of a card-carrying geek, and the humour is as dry as it is awesome. Harry, due to the nature of his work and existence, finds himself in many ludicrous situations. At the start of book six, he's running through a burning building. Carrying a box of puppies. Whilst trying to evade a horde of flying monkey demons. Who are attempting to kill him by flinging incendiary poop...and because Harry's a consistent, real character, these ludicrous situations work. They seem perfectly normal, because Harry's normal has been so well established. Other grand comedic situations include a perfectly viable incorporation of I Was a Teenage Werewolf. No, really. There's a nice sense of fun in every aspect of The Dresden Files, even in serious things like Michael's holy mission. When Michael's helping Harry with some random case, he can be hurt like anyone else, but when he's on a divinely appointed mission, he can't be harmed - thus successfully combining pretty decent theology with a classic tabletop gaming joke ("Jesus saves - everyone else takes half damage").

These books are great for stuff like lazy week-ends, or evenings when you're too tired from work to do anything else and just want to be entertained, but there's nothing on TV. They take about two hours to read, but like I said before, I want to stress that they're light - not brainless. For quick reads, there's a lot going on, but not too much. A word of warning: because Butcher respects the supernatural, and doesn't think evil is cool, the violence, and ways people are killed by demons etc., is 110% R-rated. That is to say, it's horrific and disgusting...but that's one of the things that makes this series so great in my mind.

The Dresden Files are a series; in other words, plot and character development is linear, and so the books should be read in order. People change and grow over the course of the story, and events from prior books have impacts on events in future books. So start with Storm Front, work your way up, and enjoy!