Okay. Ghost Story
There have been a lot of things that have happened so far and a lot of things have been foreshadowed, it seems to me, that will get touched on (and even more things that won’t, probably). So I’m going to talk about stuff that I suspect (and it’s based on nothing that you haven’t already read, assuming you’ve read the 12 books and the short stories) and invite you to wildly speculate along with me.
We will be spoiling so if you haven’t read the books yet (and you really should), you will not want to follow us across the jump.
Seriously. Spoilers.
Okay. So Harry heard the “DIE ALONE!” curse as he sunk into the water, right? That right there tells me that, yep, he’s dead. Those things don’t kick in unless they can. Cassius’s curse came true.
So now he’s a ghost (hence the title of the novel) and he’s only got a handful of tools available to him. I’m guessing that Soulfire is one of these and one of the tensions will be the whole cost/benefit thing of using it in service to helping his friends figure out how to get him to come back. That’s not the big mystery though. The big mystery is “Who Killed Harry?” and “How Can He Protect Molly/Karrin/Maggie?” because the guy who killed him ain’t gonna stop there, right?
It ain’t Kinkaid, I tell you that much. If only because that’s the obvious path and they’re going to spend time investigating whether it was Kinkaid but, at the end of the investigating, they’re going to find that it wasn’t him. It was, instead, a member of The Black Council. Which will be made, like, officially official this time around. We know about Cowl, we know about Peabody, and you know who else is in it?
Justin DuMorne. That’s right, he’s still alive. (They never found the body! Come on!)
So those are the big plot points we’re going to hit.
How’s he going to come back to life? His mom will help. He’ll have a conversation with his dad who, we will find out, was not as much a lovable loser as he portrayed himself but a righteous dude in his own right but, of course, couldn’t hold off the inevitable.
At the end of the day, though, Uriel and Maeve will hammer something out.
We’ll know how I did soon enough, of course. Your speculations?
I have a question, and am happy to take your council:
If I saw an episode of the TV short-lived TV show and found it dull, should I stay away from the books? Or was the TV show significantly different and/or a step down that I might still consider them a good beach read?
The television show was not very good.
The folks making it didn’t really work with Butcher and didn’t particularly care about his input. They had their vision of the show and it was not his.
I mean, in the Harry Potter movies, the folks making the movie said that they wanted to cut the extraneous Sybill Trelawney character in order to get the time under 23 hours or whatever it was.
Rowling talked with the folks and said “Oh, no. You need her. She’s very important later on!” The movie folks said “really? Oh, okay…” and put her back in.
The Television folks would have just cut the character. God knows what would have happened when they got to the part where the foreshadowing kicked in… for example, I understand that the character Bob (in the books, he’s a spirit who is a repository of knowledge who lives in a skull) was “livened up” for the television show. They made him a human actor.
Never mind that Harry took Bob from the charred remains of Justin DuMorne’s haven. Never mind that Bob is analogous to Ivy. The problem is that Bob has a lot of juicy lines and, goddamn it, they want someone to waggle their eyebrows when these lines are delivered!
Well, the television show was cancelled because it not only was not particularly faithful to the story (which has a lot of little unimportant things that become big important in later books) but, on top of that, wasn’t very good at being different.
The books are very good. If you find yourself on a plane, you could do a lot worse than to pick up Storm Front. You can get it on Amazon new for fivish bucks and used for, like, pennies.
I have read all the books and saw all the TV shows. The books are much, much better. There is little comparision between the two. Harry was a wizard detective in both, that about covers it.
It is sad that the show decideed to ignore almost all of the lore from the books and basically make a show that had the name, but nothing else.