The Dresden Files/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


For books known primarily for over-the-top awesomeness and hilarious narration, The Dresden Files can be downright horrifying at times.

Storm Front

  • The way that the mobster and his girlfriend are murdered in Storm Front. Their hearts EXPLODE. While having sex.

Fool Moon

  • The loup garou's rampage through the special investigation department. Especially chilling is the description of the thing going through the cell block, slaughtering prisoners in their cells while the prisoners further up the line are unable to flee and can only scream as they hear it getting closer.

Grave Peril

  • Mickey Mallone's condition and the barbed-wire curse. "Hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts..." along with high pitched giggling.
  • The end of Grave Peril where the Red Court vampires, led by Bianca, attack him in what could only be described as a gang rape scenario. Harry is so traumatized that whenever he brings it up it later books, he still talks about having nightmares, even in Changes. He never goes into detail, instead saying only "They did things to me," which is extremely disturbing coming from Harry "Badass" Dresden.

Death Masks

  • Shiro's death by torture.

Blood Rites

  • Madge, after the remorseless entropy curse is redirected at her.

She had plenty of time to feel it as the demonic killer, the guiding mind who had been behind the entropy curse, flowed in its semigaseous form into her mouth and throat and lungs, then extruded savage spines and tore her apart from within.
 Madge didn't manage to get out a scream as she died.
But it wasn't for lack of trying.

  • Lord Raith. Just entirely. Damn pretty-boy vampires he is terrifying.

Dead Beat

  • Corpsetaker in Dead Beat, a psychotic necromancer who specializes in stealing the bodies of victims. Before Harry meets him/her, he/she was impersonating a professor of antiquities, and while we don't see it onscreen (thankfully), we see the bloody aftermath of his/her last Body Surf: Corpsetaker swapped bodies with a probably-innocent grad student, who suddenly found herself trapped in an unfamiliar body, and was kept alive as she was gutted and tortured by her own body. Her fellow "assistant" turned out to be a ghoul who took the opportunity to carve himself some steaks.
  • A low-key but damn disturbing moment is when Harry is briefing Butters on the supernatural situation of the world. He points out that the rate at which people go missing, as in flat out disappear, is roughly equivalent to the rate at which herd animals in Africa are killed by large predators.
    • Even worse - that was a real-world statistic that Jim Butcher quoted.
  • The scene in the museum. ( No one is coming to save you, Harry.)

Proven Guilty

  • The results of the spiritual mauling of the fetches' and Molly's various victims, particularly one girl who was driven into a permanent state of catatonia. In Harry's own words, "She's not coming back."
  • Lloyd Slate's fate. He was a bastard, but nobody deserves that.

White Night

  • In White Night, some ghouls attack and kill two sixteen-year-old Wardens-in-training (and is implied to have raped one of them while doing so). Harry proceeds to roast one alive, then throw the other one into a pit, melt the sand around it into glass, then pour orange juice on it head so it'll be eaten alive by ants. Carlos eventually convinces him to have mercy on Ghoul #2 and shoot it in the head, but still... wow.
    • Hell, any of Harry's dark moments are pretty damn frightening. Remember when he blew up a half-dozen storefronts cause he was frustated? Or how he showed Molly that she wasn't ready to help him by flinging a miniature sun at her and challenging her to block it? Good Is Not Nice, indeed.

Small Favor

  • What the Denarians did to Ivy in Small Favor. Torture of adults is horrible enough, but to a child? Nicodemus may be Affably Evil, but he is still, at the core, a Complete Monster, and that scene solidifies it.
  • The hob attack in the subway. Or more specifically, Harry mentioning that hobs don't just kill their victims, but like to drag them back into the Nevernever.

Turn Coat

  • Special mention goes out to the description of the Skinwalker in Turn Coat when Harry turned his Sight on the thing.

Try to imagine the stench of rotten meat. Imagine the languid, arrhythmic pulsing of a corpse filled with maggots. Imagine the scent of stale body odor mixed with mildew, the sound of nails screeching across a chalkboard, the taste of rotten milk, and the flavor of spoiled fruit.
Now imagine that your eyes can experience those things, all at once, in excruciating detail.

    • Made even worse by the fact that Harry will never, ever forget it.
  • On the subject of Shagnasty, there's what it did to Thomas to get to Harry. It slowly flayed him alive, then when his vampiric regeneration ran out and he was about to die, fed him a random innocent woman. Thomas's out-of-control Hunger would force him to rape them to death. Then it started over again, repeating the process so many times Thomas lost count. No wonder he fell off the Friendly Neighborhood Vampires wagon...
    • Even worse is the fact that Shagnasty only did that because it has Intellectus on how to torture you in the most horrific way possible. So it, in fact, has no idea why it tortured Thomas like it did, only that it would be the most effective way to cause pain for both Harry and Thomas.
  • After Lara is hit by a concussion grenade in Turn Coat, she goes from "sexy Dark Action Girl" to "burnt-up corpse powered by pure rage." Then she disembowels and "eats" her cousin.

Changes

  • Try Ebenezar McCoy casually ripping the life from 200 men with two waves of the Blackstaff. This is why we have the Laws of Magic, folks. You know it's bad when even Harry is appalled at the sheer cold-bloodedness of it.

"You took the wrong contract, boys."

  • The Red Court attack on the FBI building. Made especially disturbing by Susan's explanation of their methodology: start from the ground floor and kill their way up, taking out anyone they find, solely to "send a message."
  • Lloyd Slate's fate, again.

Ghost Story

  • During Harry's invasion of the Big Bad's fortress from the Nevernever side, he unleashes the ghosts of killers on the enemy forces. Harry Dresden describes the scene as fresh scenes for his nightmares. He only describes the least disturbing sequence from the resulting slaughter, and leaves the rest up to the reader's imagination. It's bad enough.
  • He Who friggin' Walks Behind. During a flashback, we finally learn the details of Harry's first encounter with it. Turns out it's a huge, incredibly strong and even more sadistic monstrosity that is always behind you, no matter where you turn, so the only way you can see it is in a mirror or other reflective surface. 16-year-old Harry first sees it reflected in an arcade machine in a gas station; he turns around to look and sees nothing, but when he turns back, it's now standing two feet closer. And smiling. Shortly afterward, it tore a person in three pieces with no effort at all. And no, you can't just stand with your back to the wall; Harry tried that, and it still came up behind him, lifted him by the neck with a tentacle, and threw him across the room. Think equal parts Shagnasty and Slender Man, and you'll have a bit of an idea.
    • Not to mention what Harry feels when looking at He Who Walks Behind. That descriptive monologue would have done H.P. Lovecraft proud.
    • Also, now we know exactly why Harry had such a Brown Note reaction in Blood Rites when he found out that He Who Walks Behind was the one behind the entropy curse.
    • Harry asked for the creature's name. He got it.
  • What Molly pretended to become by the time of the book, and what she actually becomes by the time of the book.

General

  • Harry's frequent soliloquies about the true nature of the Crapsack World of the Dresdenverse bear mentioning, as he is frequent to point out how vast and unknown the world really is and perhaps even more disturbingly, how good we are at simply ignoring it. The basic premise sums it up best. It's a big world at there and humanity is nowhere near the top of the food chain.
  • The White Council's stance on dark magic. Doesn't matter how minor or what good intentions you used it for or even if you knew that you were breaking a law to begin with. You'll end up somewhere with a hood over your head as they prepare to chop it off. No trial involved what so ever. What makes it especially bad is that in Molly's case is that the Merlin would have done it to simply spite Harry, and, if Micheal hadn't arrived in time, he would have walked in on his daughter being executed (though being a Champion of God makes you king of nick of time rescues.)
    • What's worse? The history of Black Magic is one long case of proving them right. Despite the fact that she knows it would get both her and Harry executed, Molly is still too eager to invade people's minds and mess around inside them. Both worlds wars might have been averted or at least reduced if they got to Kemmler early on in his career.
  • The White Court, especially the Raiths. They can rape you to death, and make you like it. Yeah.
  • Also the Red Court, horrible rubbery drooling bat-monsters.
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