Changes By Jim Butcher
Title: Changes by Jim Butcher
Pages: 448 pages
Rating: -100 for morality
Genre: Urban fantasy
Let me start this off with a caveat--I love The Dresden Files series, both bookverse and TV-verse. I find the women strong and compelling; I love the snarkiness of the hero; I love the fact that not only does he get called on his chauvinistic behavior but that his sexism comes back to bite him more than once; the sheer insanity of some of the climaxes; the clichéd monsters that Butcher actually manages to make threatening. I've enjoyed the series, and while I wouldn't recommend that anyone start with the first few books (any more than a Discworld fan would recommend that you start with The Color of Magic or The Light Fantastic) I do feel that the series gets better as it goes along.
And until this latest book was published, I would have stuck by that.
This book is the one that jumped the shark. In fact, given the series' theme, I'd say it jumped Cthulhu.
Changes starts with Susan Rodriguez--Harry Dresden's ex-girlfriend, half-turned Red Court vampire and, since the half-transformation, guerrilla fighter in an organization dedicated to fighting vampires--calling up Harry with some bad news--the Red Court has kidnapped their eight-year-old daughter, Maggie. Oh, you mean Susan never told Harry that they have a kid before? Oops.
Harry goes nuts at this news. And I will allow for the fact that women and children being in danger are a huge Berserk Button of his. Yes, Harry lost his mother at birth and his father when he was six, while his mentor and adopted father tried to use mind control on him at sixteen to turn him into a puppet before siccing an Eldritch Abomination on him, and as a result, he has HUGE issues with the importance of family. Yes, he has a tendency to take impossible risks to save people. Yes. All of this is true.
But Harry jumps to a stance that makes no sense to me. And if you can't buy this, the rest of the book doesn't really work. He hangs up the phone...and he starts reacting as if he has known and loved and treasured this little girl from the day of her conception.
Keep in mind--he knows that she's physically female, that her biological mother gave her name of Margaret Angelina, that she grew up south of the border and she was adopted. That's it. He knows nothing else. He does not know ANYTHING about her as a person. He doesn't know her last name. He doesn't know what country she grew up in.
Harry doesn't stop to consider any of this. Knowledge of blood relationship establishes insta-parental love. That's all it takes, as far as Harry's concerned. I guess he's never heard of biological parents abusing and killing their children. That, or they don't know that the kids are really related to them.
And no one ever calls him on this throughout the entire book. No one ever says, "Harry, calm down. I can understand being worried about the kid, I can understand wanting to save the kid--BUT YOU DON'T KNOW HER. You've never MET her. She's not waiting for her daddy to come and save her from the monsters, because you aren't her daddy! You're a SPERM DONOR! Her adopted parents--the only parents she's ever known--were murdered by vampires. She doesn't know you from a bag of hay! And you wouldn't know her if you passed her on the street! Calm. Down!"
Nope. Everyone reacts as if as feeling that he has a deep and loving relationship with a child he's never met, spoken to, or known existed is perfectly normal, and just how every parent would behave. The fact that Harry has never filled the social or emotional role of father for Maggie is simply ignored. Instead, his attempts to save Maggie are presented as parental in nature--and never mind that he tries to save people in every goddamned book.
That's bad enough. But okay. I could try to spin this as Harry's irrationality on the subject of family.
Then there's a fire in Harry's apartment building, and Harry breaks his back. He's completely paralyzed. Good news: he's a wizard, so his body is already working to repair the injury completely. Bad news: it's going to take about fifty years before his back is healed. By this time Harry knows that the kid is going to be sacrificed within about 72 hours, so not only does he not want to wait around in a paralyzed body for half a century, he really can't afford to.
So he starts making offers to various supernatural entities--his loyalty in exchange for his health and the freedom to go find and save his daughter.
The first entity to be offered one Harry Dresden, slightly battered, is the Archangel Uriel. He says no, he's not allowed to make that kind of a deal. The second is Mab, Queen of the Winter Court of Faerie. (Think "Unseelie Court." Yeah. The lady is not nice.) She has been offering Harry the job of Winter Knight since Book 4, so this didn't surprise me one bit. What did surprise me was Harry's response to Mab's "What if I say no to your offer?"
For Harry tells her, point blank, that if she says no, he'll just turn to the Denarians.
The Knights of the Blackened Denarius, or the Denarians for short, are a group of fallen angels who inhabit willing and very, very psychotic human hosts. They have come incredibly close to destroying the world several times in the series; they've been trying to get Harry to work for them since the fifth book. They are evil beyond the telling of it.
But what makes this truly horrible is that in their last appearance, the Denarians kidnapped and tortured a little girl who happens to be the repository for all recorded human knowledge.
Let me repeat that. To save a little girl who has been kidnapped and is being tortured, Harry is willing to become someone who would kidnap and torture another little girl.
This was the point at which I stopped reading for a couple of days. I was sickened by this.
Why? Because Harry has clung to his old-fashioned, quixotic moral code for the entire series, despite lethal danger, mental anguish and physical torture. Harry has always been the guy who will do the right thing, no matter what the cost to himself.
And he just threw that moral code away. It doesn't matter that he didn't make the deal with the devil. What matters is that he was willing to. Because the Harry Dresden I cared about never would have done that.
Butcher lost me right there.
But I kept on plugging. Maybe Butcher would find a way of fixing this. Just maybe.
It didn't get better. There was one bright shining moment where Harry finally reached Maggie (at a Mayan temple, no less!), expecting her face to light up with relief. Instead, Maggie took one look at this stranger dressed, I swear, in a suit of enchanted armor...and started screaming her head off. This was Harry's first clue that maybe this was not going to be the flawless parent-child relationship he'd imagined.
I have to say something here about Susan's outfit for the rescue mission. Like Harry's suit of armor, she had a special outfit. Unlike the armor, however, it was not designed for battle. In one sense it was practical, for yes, Susan needed to be able to infiltrate the ranks of Red Court; yes, the King of the Red Court fancied himself a Mayan god so he demanded that his followers dress up like Mayan warriors and priestesses.
But putting a dark-skinned woman in the skimpy attire of a jungle priestess? It was very much like those 1940s movies with words like "bwana" in the title, where the white men are the action heroes and the women, whether white or POCs, are fanservice.
Oh, and Susan doesn't even get to pick or suggest her outfit; Harry's red-haired, pale-skinned faerie godmother, the Leanansidhe, does so. Granted, Lea also picks Harry's armor...but there's a reference to her playing dress-up with Susan as if she were a doll.
And then, finally, there's Susan's death.
Here's the situation: a spell has been cast so that the death of the youngest in a bloodline will cause the death of all in the bloodline if the youngest dies before midnight. The widow of a vampire Harry dueled with back in the fifth book wants to kill Maggie so that everyone in Maggie's bloodline will die. She doesn't give a damn about Harry; Harry is collateral damage. She's trying to assassinate Harry's grandfather--who just happened to drop a satellite on her husband and his entire household of minions for trying to kill Harry. By killing the man with the bloodline spell, she also kills off every possible younger relative before they can even think of vengeance. Give the lady credit for being genre savvy.
And where did the Red Court get the information on where Maggie was? From Susan's superior and frequent field partner, Martin, who not only betrayed Maggie but set up their entire organization to be butchered in return for full vampirism. Harry sees that Susan isn't grasping who betrayed Maggie and--knowing that she's under a ton of stress and that she can barely control her blood thirst as it is--tells her that Martin is the traitor.
Susan goes for his throat. Literally. And she drains him dry.
Which means that Susan is no longer a half-vampire. She is now a full vampire. The youngest of the bloodline.
Now, if Susan had ever said--just in a sentence or two--that she would do anything, even sacrifice her humanity, to save her little girl (and unlike Harry, she knows Maggie personally, albeit as "a family friend"), or if Susan and Harry had ever discussed--again, just for a sentence or two--what they would want the other to do if one of them was turned, I would have less trouble accepting this. Susan would have made a conscious and, dare I say, heroic choice to sacrifice herself.
But that isn't what happens. First, Martin manipulates Susan--it even says so in the text--and then Harry deliberately pushes her over the edge, knowing what the results will be. Susan never has any agency at all.
And make no mistake, this is not a choice of hers. For we see her kneeling on the ground--knowing that she is transforming permanently into a monster and that she cannot stop it--and staring at her hands in horror.
And then Harry tells her that if she wants their daughter to live, she has to die.
She can't take the sacrificial knife, though. Alien hand syndrome. Her hands have transformed; they're no longer under her control.
Again, it's a moment when she could have shown agency. She could have nodded and said, "Put the dagger there," and rolled over and picked it up with her teeth, at least trying to stab herself with it. She wouldn't have had to succeed. Just one moment of unconquerable courage that showed that while her body is changing, her spirit is still determined to protect her child and destroy the vampires who turned her.
But she doesn't. She simply kneels there and begs Harry to kill her, because she can't do it herself.
And, after thinking that Martin intended this all along (which I highly doubt; Martin is capable of Xanatos Gambits, but he would have had no way of knowing that Harry would be insane enough to make a deal with Queen Mab, thus enabling Lea to dress Susan like a Mayan, thus allowing Susan to be anywhere in Maggie's vicinity on the day of the sacrifice), Harry kills Susan.
A woman who, please note, has been described in canon multiple times as Harry's true love.
Until the text said that she was dead, I honestly thought that he'd find a third way out of this that would save both Susan and Maggie. I thought that at least he would try, because Harry is notorious for that. Not this time. The expedient thing to do was to kill the woman he supposedly loved more than life itself...so he killed her. No hesitation. No doubts.
In fact, the very opposite of the emotional, passionate, fierce defender of innocents that Harry has been up till now.
It all felt consummately wrong...as if I'd blundered into an Evil Goateed Universe.
I am beginning to wonder if Butcher is a Joe Quesada fan.
The book is not bad in every respect; it is suspenseful and action-packed and complex. But it was failtastic at consistent characterization, at canon continuity, at presentation of an existing moral code and at granting the female protagonist any agency at all.
It probably says something that when I put the book down, I left it where it lay and did not open it again...not even to check canon for fanfic. I do not want to incorporate this coprolith into a fictional universe that I love.
I'm still reading the fanfic, because the fans are still writing about impractical, emotional, idealistic Harry. But at this point, I doubt whether I'll read the next book in the series, Ghost Story, or any of the books that follow. Butcher is no longer writing about Harry Dresden. He is writing about a delusional, manipulative, vicious dark wizard...and one book with him was more than enough.