Should I buy more Dresden Files?

Alistair Hutton

I got the first Dresden Files book, both I and my wife thought it was very good an enjoyable.
We then got the second (Fool's Moon) and it was pretty bad. Real second novel syndrome all over the shop. I want to know whether it's worthwhile picking up the third (and further).

Do the books get over this slump? Does the quality go back to that of the first, do they take a while to recover?

zepherin

I didn't think Fool's Moon was that bad. I thought it was ok, but I really like the whole series. Grave Peril and Summer Knight are great, but if after Grave Peril you aren't excited, then the series is probably not for you.

I personally think the whole series is amazing.

TheDrifter

I think Fool's Moon is by far the weakest in the series.

Things really seem to get back on track with Summer Knight (the fourth book).

Rayze

Definitely keep on reading. The first three books are just ok but then the quality jumps considerably and the stories and characters get better and better

Forar

There's a thread on the series in Debate and Discourse, but of course there are also spoilers galore within as well.

To jump on the bandwagon, books 1 and 2 aren't great (I enjoyed them, but recognize that they are early works of a new author at the time), but 3+ get markedly better.

Shadowhope

I'd give Storm Front a 5/10, Fool Moon a 4/10, Grave Peril a 5/10, Summer Knight a 6/10, Death Masks a 9/10, Blood Rites a 6/10, and every book after Dead Beat gets somewhere between 7-9/10.

Dead Beat gets all of the tens. All of them.

Alistair Hutton

Forar wrote: »

There's a thread on the series in Debate and Discourse, but of course there are also spoilers galore within as well.

Yeah, I presumed that thread would be A) Spoiler tastic and B ) filled with people who would unconditionally tell me to buy all the books right now.

badpoet

I would. I agree that Storm Front is better than Fool Moon. Grave Peril was where the quality started moving back up (about equal to Storm Front) and Summer Knight is the one where he catches his stride and the books move from okay to nearly great.

Nova_C

You can tell in the series when Butcher figures out where he's going with it and the quality of the books goes up remarkably quickly. Book 5 or so, I think.

The latest stuff has been amazing and if you enjoyed the first book even a little bit, you'd do yourself a disservice by not continuing.

Tomanta

Consensus is (as you can tell) that Book 2 is the worst. Keep reading.

see317

Can't really say anything that hasn't been said already, but this is another vote for stick with the series. It really hits it's stride after book 3.

zepherin

Shadowhope wrote: »

Dead Beat gets all of the tens. All of them.

Dead Beat is amazing. Small Favor also amazing, really most of the books are, and his writing style get's better with the books. Cold days the most recent book was great too. I will totally give Texa$ to Jim Butcher for Skin Game audio book.

Get the audio books. James Marsters is Marsterful.

Grislo

I'm probably the odd one out, but I don't think the books get better. Butcher improves as a writer, technically, but the stories and the 'world' doesn't improve.

The first book is a pretty good urban fantasy thingy, and then it just gets sillier and dumber from that point onwards. Everything just gets amped up to an eye rolling degree, and overall it suffers badly from 'roleplayer-as-writer' syndrome, and some bad author inserts. It's essentially melodramatic, and not in a good way.

It really depends on what you are looking for, so I think you'll basically have to try it out and see for yourself - are libraries an option for you?

CelestialBadger

Don't buy. Library!

noir_blood

Read Simon R. Green's Nightshade series of books instead.

Grunt's Ghosts

Im a huge fan of the Dresden Files but Ill agree partly to Grislo, things get amped up crazy high after awhile. Which makes sense giving the kinds of enemies he makes along the way, but I miss the days when the books were more modern noir (I use that loosely) and about small problems instead of World(s) shaking events that it is now. But its a great read and one of the few book series Im actively following (Song of Ice and Fire being the other one).

Straygatsby

noir_blood wrote: »

Read Simon R. Green's Nightshade series of books instead.

Read both! Personally, I like Green's world building better, but his writing is far hammier, and Butcher is already pretty fucking hammy.

Caelum Militis

Straygatsby wrote: »

noir_blood wrote: »

Read Simon R. Green's Nightshade series of books instead.

Read both! Personally, I like Green's world building better, but his writing is far hammier, and Butcher is already pretty fucking hammy.

Simon R. Green's Nightside books are great (as well as the Deathstalker series if you like sci fi), but his writing style can be rough, and his choice of words (especially character responses) become very predictable. If you're going to read them, I'd suggest reading Shadows Fall first. It's standalone from his other works, but the Nightside books reference it quite a few times.

That aside, I'm in the "stick with it" column for the Dresden books.

zepherin

I like Simon R. Green as well. I like the names and titles he gives people. "Punk God of the Straight Razor." That is amazing.

Vater5B

I really enjoy the Dresden Files, but I feel that the books are really inconsistent. With any series that runs as long as this one, there is an amount of baggage that it picks up that ultimately has to be hand waved away lest there be no tension. Without getting too spoilerly, it feels at times that knowing there is another book ahead causes Butcher to keep things nice and tidy to make the storyline easier to resolve. As someone above said, it starts to feel like a DnD campaign, where everything has nice bookends. Again, I enjoy them a good deal, but know that every so many books there is a clunker. Fool Moon is without question the worst, but there are a few others that took me a while to get through.

Something From the Nightside by Simon Green was a dreadfully dull read for me. I wouldn't recommend it as a substitute.

Something I can wholeheartedly recommend are the Alex Verus novels by Benedict Jacka. They feel a lot like the Dresden books but are a little more light and read much more quickly.