The Dresden Files: Twelve Months by: Jim Butcher

 

The Dresden Files’ routes in classic pulp noir fiction mixed with the 1990s sense of fantasy was what drew me to it six years ago.  The series changed, gradually, never quite outside of its urban fantasy roots but closer to an epic that by Peace Talks and Battle Ground there were several pieces on the board and the internal world had changed: the supernatural revealed, a main character killed in a rather emotional but sexist manner, and Jim Butcher continued a streak of five year gaps between the books in limbo as to how to continue.  Twelve Months is a book that by Butcher’s own admission was not part of the initial plan, yet it’s The Dresden Files novel that feels the most personal.  The Law, released in 2022, almost reads in retrospect as the catalyst for Butcher writing Twelve Months, not as a stopgap but with real intention to examine the new world pushing the series forward.  In his personal life it becomes clear reading Twelve Months that the pain Harry Dresden is going through is at the very least semiautobiographical.  The conclusion of Twelve Months is an obvious one, but one that everyday people sometimes just need to hear again, that healing from grief takes time and is a different process for everyone and that one’s community is more important than anything.  People may become scared in the face of disaster, those selfish enough will stoke them into violence, but in the end it’s the people that are why we do what we do.  It is not for me to speculate as to whatever hardship Butcher experienced in writing Twelve Months, but this is the novel of a man who has also changed in the time between books, as we all must.

 

Let’s get the major criticisms of the novel out of the way.  While the time span of the novel being a year allows for more time and a deeper focus on the character work, Butcher does not adjust to the pacing of a year in approximately 450 pages for the first 100 pages.  There are points, especially early on, where editorial mistakes have slipped through the cracks: Harry having the same internal expositive narration which is very likely a mistake that was not caught in editing as the most egregious example.  The emotional climax of the novel also happens approximately 50 pages before the final action sequence acting as a second climax instead of a falling action.  This is a perfectly fine action sequence, but it does read more as a tease for things to come with what it represents, and it releases some dramatic tension between Harry and Thomas almost too quickly, but this might be part of Butcher’s own reconciling of issues with himself.  It does at least thematically fit within Twelve Months’ thesis of people coming together.  What may have incorporated it more would be if the subplot of citizens in unrest and protesting Dresden and the now revealed supernatural had more of a presence.  Again, Butcher expresses this subplot as repetitive scenes instead of developing it within the narrative.  The attempt is to make the protesters seem normal, scared people who just wish to go back to something they could never get back, but it reads as if Butcher is not really making a stance or giving enough of their perspective.  Not giving any of them individual identities is particularly weak, they are not characters but a means to an end to have the secondary climax occur.

 

Where Twelve Months really succeeds is the examination of Harry Dresden as a man becoming less and less human.  In covering a year in Harry’s life, Butcher draws on the entire tangled web of being the Winter Knight, Murphy’s death, the destruction of Chicago, and Thomas being in a coma.  Practically every character Butcher has introduced throughout the series somewhere and introduces several new characters as setup for the end of The Dresden Files which is clearly approaching including a new apprentice in Fitz, a bodyguard Valkyrie Bear, and several gargoyles, but it is use of Molly Carpenter as Harry’s anchor to humanity that is fascinating.  They are both under the power of Mab and the Winter Court, making them equals of their own sort.  Molly has grown as a character, Twelve Months casting off any remaining shackles of her attraction to Harry, instead the pair find solace in friendship.  While the conclusion of the novel is that Harry has several friends, he does push several of them away.  Molly is the one who tells Harry that he needs to be a father to his own daughter, and much of the novel hangs on Harry taking those little moments to do that.  Maggie becomes the one aspect of Harry’s life that he can keep his agency with, the twists of Twelve Months being specific to how both Lara Raith and the White Court of vampires and Mab and her Winter Court have their own machinations.  The engagement between Harry and Lara is the other major subplot of the novel.  Butcher is restrained here, this could easily have fallen back into misogynistic tropes with Lara as the femme fatale, but the growing platonic relationship between Harry and Lara has its own type of sweetness.  It’s sweet enough that when Winter’s plans are revealed, the betrayal feels as horrific as it should as stealing agency from the cogs in the machine that is society is an idea at the heart of Twelve Months.  While there is occasional power fantasy involved, mainly in Harry building towards getting exactly what he wants, Butcher does remember to put a price on things, an obvious price for any genre savvy reader, but still a price to add at least some bittersweet weight among the novel’s generally happy ending.

 

Overall, Twelve Months is close to a return to form after the underwhelming regression found in The Law.  The Law feels more like a prelude to what Butcher was working through with Twelve Months as something almost entirely different to what The Dresden Files has become.  Different is actually what the series needed to put pieces in place and really allow for development of the characters as an endgame comes slightly clearer into view.   It’s a novel emblematic in the change of the last six years, weakest when elements from earlier drafts and ideas slip through the cracks, but Butcher brings just enough of the charm to make it one of the stronger entries in the series.  8/10.