There was a time in my life, a pretty long time actually, when I would have read the next Dresden Files book the night it came out. I’d have my acquisition strategy worked out, I’d have left work early, and I’d have powered through it in a single evening, staying up until an ungodly hour to finish it if required. Today, the book’s been out for a week and in my hands for five days and I haven’t even opened the package it was delivered in. I actually didn’t even realize it was coming out until a couple weeks beforehand, promptly forgot again, and only got it eventually because one of my coworkers brought it up when I was at my computer so I could order it immediately. I’m sure that my penchant for staying up to ungodly hours to play Final Fantasy 14 has something to do with my shift in priorities, but I have to admit that I’m just not as excited about the franchise as I once was. I’m still gonna read the book and however many more there are before the series comes to an end, but I’ll admit that the shifting scales and recent story events have kind of lost me. I mean, I understand that this kind of noir-adjacent story requires the protagonist to be the perpetual underdog, even as his competence grows (this is the 18th book in the series, after all. Harry Dresden HAS to be a power player at this point) and I understand why a major character was killed in the last book (age is an issue for a series that covers about a year per book and only SOME of the characters have special magical regenerative powers that slow their aging/divine blessings that keep them combat relevant as the baddies turn from local vampires to deities and deific figures), but I don’t have to like it.

I’m sure there’s a lot that could be said about the mysogeny at the heart of the series (it’s so bad in the first three books that I’ve never reread them) and how this huge inflection point in the 17th book in the series, ostensibly to write out a character that wouldn’t leave but had to go, involved the unceremonious murder of a woman. I mean, at least she didn’t die in order to motivate a man so much as to up the stakes and add to the horror of the moment, but it really broke my suspension of disbelief, even though I was expecting it after the setup of the 16th book (this and the 17th book were a pair covering a moment in time, a single story split into two books due to length, and are the only entries in the franchise so far that aren’t separated from the next book in line by about a year) undid some of the reassurance at the end of the 15th book. It’s difficult not to expect something bad when a character goes from “hurt bad but she’ll recover fine” to “struggling to move even after a year of recovery and physical therapy” between books. There was a significant tonal change in the treatment of this character between the novels, over the course of the many real-world years that separated them, and while such changes are absolutely the prerogative of the author and part-and-parcel to writing a series of books over decades, it made it clear that something bad was going to happen. Then something bad happened and now I live in a world where a reliable if not innovative series has turned rather predictable.

I don’t know that this next book won’t hook me. I suspect it won’t, but I don’t know that for sure. I should probably read it so I can get an answer at least, but I’m uncertain whether or not I want to spend the time on it just now. The thought of reading this new book makes me feel extra tired and, on top of how exhausting work has been lately, it all makes me want to lay down on the floor and weep for a little bit [even more so now, as I hit 72 hours with a total of 8 spent sleeping due to insomnia, but you’ll read about that next week], so I think I’m going to put the book at the bottom of my to-be-read pile if I ever take it out of the box and just not think about it for now. I have enough other stuff to read, enough other stuff going on, that I don’t need the next book in a long franchise staring me down every time I walk through my living room. I mean, what I really need is some kind of rest and relaxation away from all the stuff that I’ve been giving my time and energy to, but it seems like the next entry in a once-beloved franchise is not the way to go for that. Which… feels kind of weird, I’m not going to lie.

Beyond all that, I think there’s a part of me that can’t handle power fantasies and stories about heroic figures delivering justice. The world feels like it doesn’t have the space for those kind of stories right now, not when we all need to pitch in and do the laborious, unglamorous, and plodding work of trying to bring about societal change. No one person, no matter their position in the world, can fix this. No scrappy underdog can win the day through grit, determination, and clever thinking. The world will be saved by communities organizing with communities and the constant sacrifice and effort of every day people who have decided that they aren’t going to take it anymore, or even let their neighbors take it in their stead. So any story that revolves around a single lynchpin figure is less and less appealing as the weeks of 2026 pass and we see how much work it takes to make change and how that work is best shared across everyone. I don’t want a lone figure type power fantasy anymore. I want stories about people who are good to each other in the face of hardship, that deals with the reality that most people, when finally spurred to act, will help out if they’re given the chance to. And that’s just not the Dresden Files. It might have been it once, but there’s not really room for that kind of story where the 17th book left off. Maybe I’ll save it for a year or two, like I did with most TV shows and my anime preferences, and come back to it when I’m ready to imagine what it feels like to be powerful and strong again rather than being unable to enjoy doing that due to the cognitive dissonance between the world I’m imagining and my own situation in life.