Jim Butcher has managed to write a set of novels for a very particular set of readers and still be successful. The collective Dresden Files can only be described as wizard noir. Harry Dresden is a paranormal private eye, and the only wizard listed in the phone book. He is wry, sardonic, and witty. He is faithful, archaic and the consummate underdog.
Harry is the everyman, with magic.
Butcher brings us Harry Dresden assuming his readers know fantasy. He doesn’t bother to explain what Harry’s wizardly probation, the Doom of Damocles, is a reference to. Nor does he explain why it is clever for his “probation officer,” Morgan, to carry a sword (here's why).
He doesn’t bother to explain vampires or werewolves (unless he is delineating his classifications), he uses high fantasy terms like sidhe (Fairies) and references both the Winter and Summer Court (part of high fantasy’s sidhe lore).
What Butcher does for his fellow fantasy lovers, is throw in a bit of the classic noir style murder mystery. Harry often meets, and feels compelled to save, smoldering femme fatales. He has his own sense of justice. He tends to stumble and bumble at times, but pulls through with the quality white magic when the need arises. He has self doubt. He is a flawed hero in a leather duster.
The Dresden Files reads quickly. Butcher is, among other things, an expert at pacing his novels. They don’t take a lot of thought, but they damn sure are entertaining.
I recommend the series, with this caveat: know your high fantasy, it makes the books better.
As a general rule, I am a sucker for any piece of writing that takes the common stories of our past, the fairy tales, and twists them for a new look into our storytelling lineage.
In The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly does just that. Connolly uses bits and pieces of our classic fables and fairy tales to examine childhood grief. The opening of The Book of Lost Things is heartbreaking. Connolly uses short sentences and terse verbiage to drive home the pain his young protagonist, David, is feeling as he watches his mother slowly waste away and die. To add to the grief, within five months David’s father begins seeing another woman; soon they are married and a new baby is on the way.
David begins having blackouts. He hears the books that he loves whispering to him. He is slowly going crazy. Then it happens: he slides into the world of his books via a crack in a sunken garden.
This is where Connolly has amazing moments of brilliance. His villain, The Crooked Man, is a combination of Rumpelstiltskin and other Trickster archetypes from stories past (think Loki, Coyote, Raven and Raynard the Fox). David encounters The Woodsman of Red Riding Hood fame who tells him the stories of Red Riding Hood (she commits an act of bestiality with the wolf that leads to the creation of the Loups - half man, half wolf - that chase David throughout the book), as well as the story of Hansel and Gretel (equally perverse and twisted as that of Red).
David faces harpies and the trolls of the Billy Goats Gruff. He meets the 7 dwarves (they spout communist ideals about the worker being oppressed) and a very fat and obnoxious Snow White.
He helps Browning’s Childe Roland find his Dark Tower (in Connolly’s version, a quest for his gay lover, Raphael), which in turn is the Briar Rose tower that holds Sleeping Beauty ( who is actually an evil, enchanted succubus that kills Roland and tries to kill David).
At its heart, The Book of Lost Things is a classic hero archetype story. David completes the hero’s journey, and that just seems right for a book that relies so heavily on classic tales.
There are moments in this book that truly sparkle and amaze. Connolly’s understanding and treatment of the stories of antiquity is both deft and twisted. However, there are moments when the book feels muddled in Connolly’s desire to fit as many of those tales in to the story as possible. The real world setting, that of WWII England, seems unnecessary and the last two chapters, in which David grows in to adulthood and returns to the story world upon his death, take away from the rest of the story by not allowing the reader to finish David’s life on their own.
After all that, The Book of Lost Things is still a well written book that is entertaining and worth your time.
You should read this.
*Note: while The Book of Lost Things is a piece of adult fiction, it won the 2007 Alex Award, which honors adult books that appeal to teen readers.
