/lit/ - Literature

I thought I should read something more contemporary than usual, so I picked up Jim Butcher's Storm Front (2000) from a bargain bin. This is the first book of his popular Dresden Files series, an urban fantasy that combines elements of detective fiction, police procedurals and magic. The protag is a practicing wizard for hire in modern day rain-soaked Chicago; an impoverished and dishevilled technophobe with a dark history who feels the weight of the world upon him. In this book, a routine missing husband job and a gruesome murder case become entwined, and the unfortunate protag is soon embroiled with a mafia boss, demons, a vampiress, a rival wizard, an increasingly impatient police, and the wroth of the 'White Council' who govern magic.

The book is well plotted; Butcher deftly orders a narrative involving many conflicting parties and interests in a coherent way, while giving us entertaining action sequences, twists, and lighter comic moments. The prose is written in a fast-paced first person POV with much dialogue, but for my taste there are too many hackneyed Die Hard-esque quips, Americanisms ('gee', 'you have got to be kidding me'), plot recaps, and extended passages of cogitation. Furthermore, the characterisation is thin, mostly constructed from cliches. Even so, this is a competently done piece of frivolity, something I would have enjoyed a lot more when I was younger. Now, though, I doubt I will continue with the series unless it appears under my nose in another bargain bin. So I will have to diverge from the opinion of best-selling author Patrick Rothfuss, who lavished five stars at Goodreads, and merely award Storm Front a lukewarm 2/5 rating.