Book Chop: Blood Rites (Dresden Files #6)

Title: Blood Rites
Author: Jim Butcher
Genre: Urban fantasy
Verdict: Maintains the awesome pacing, humor, and story.

This is going to be a short Chop, because I'm starting to get a feel for how these Dresden books go. It's kind of like reading a mix between Burn Notice and Harry Potter. There's the overall story arc of the war between wizards and vampires, and then each individual episode (or book) shows Harry handling a particular case.

Then you mix in some humor, some cool new mythos, a cast of interesting characters, and a mystery, and you're off.

In book six of this series, Harry is dealing with vampires again, specifically of the Black Court (the really nasty ones.) He also finds out he has a half-brother, which I didn't see coming. Consequently, he learns more about his mother.

The one really sketchy part about this book (and the series in general) is the amount of sexual content. However, I'll be the first to say that Butcher is more careful about it than his urban fantasy peers (who are his inferiors.) Book five (DEATH MASKS) was bad enough to prompt me to skip a few minutes ahead on the audio book, and I didn't miss anything I regret.

The reason I bring it up with BLOOD RITES is that Harry is handling a case of murders on the set of a pornographic film. When the details of the case were revealed, my initial reaction was that I might not be entirely thrilled with this story. Still, I let it unfold and told myself that if it got bad, I'd shut it off.

Jim Butcher has written Harry Dresden as a chivalrous character with solid values about women, and how they should be treated. Those values didn't get set aside to write a story about a porno; rather, Dresden strengthened his resolve to be true to himself, and we saw the industry through his eyes. Sex in those films, in those studios, is nothing like the real thing. It's cheap, uncomfortable, meaningless, and damaging.

That being the case, it played into the urban fantasy lore, and--surprisingly--into the story.

As it turns out, vampires (and their secret underground power circles) have a big hand in the pornography industry because it damages peoples' understanding of love versus lust. Love makes people immune to certain types of emotional vampirism, so it's in those vampires' interest to keep people from knowing what pure love is. Pornography destroys that understanding.

I'm not only pleased that Butcher presented it this way in his story, but that he also did it without beating the reader over the head. You could look at it as "just Harry's opinion" on certain things, but when you get into the whole fantasy element of it, you see the real-world principles behind it. Bravo, Butcher.

I'm going to be reading the next six books in the series during the rest of this summer. Book 13 comes out in July, so I should be just in time to catch that one. And stay tuned for a post on some other things I'll be reading--there's gonna be a summer project here on GrahamChops.