"And while I'm at it, I'm also not terribly fond of the concept behind 'black magic', insofar as it "Drives one evil", so to speak; that using forbidden magic makes you irredeemably bad. I'd have preferred more moral ambiguity, in that the white council hands out harsh punishments with a narrow mind-set, in response to magics that they've deemed to be 'bad'. As it stands, Jim Butcher seems to want to give us this moral grayness and stain the purity of the white council when it executes people, but by the story's own logic, such people have been 'turned evil', which is kind of a cop-out I feel, but, there it is. ...I've also never really been sold on 'evil dream harry', which I think is silly. I really kind of hate any dream sequences in these stories, actually- they're kind of like a magical deus-ex-machina for Dresden to pause in the middle of dying and figure out he had some kind of super power all along he never realized.
"In the end however, I'm enjoying it so far. Urban fantasy can become horribly cliched with ease, and I suspect if I were experiencing the Dresden Files in any kind of visual medium (cough cough <_< ) it too would become tedious; but as novels, they're enjoyable. They lag in parts where Butcher feels the inevitable need to re-describe everything we've seen before, from what Murphy looks like to the state and location of Dresden's apartment- but a seasoned reader can easily glance over the paragraphs devoted to this, and get to the meat of things."

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