I am still a fan of Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files series of books. Yes, still. My mind hasn't changed at all in the past few months since the last novel came out (handily reviewed by me here). And I doubt my mind will ever be changed. It's a good series. A great series, in fact. Go read it. But for those who need a quick recap... Harry Dresden is a wizard who works as a private investigator in Chicago. He even advertises in the Yellow Pages. There, recap done.

Considering my fandom, I have been greatly looking forward to the release of this book, Side Jobs, which is a collection of all previously published short stories in the series. For the past several years, Butcher has released various short stories in different anthologies, such as Mean Streets and Strange Brew (both edited by P.N. Elrod), Many Bloody Returns (edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner), and Songs of Love and Death (edited by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin, busy doing editing work, apparently, instead of writing Book 5 of his Song of Ice and Fire series), and now here they are, all in one place, for all Dresden fans to enjoy.

Why is this a big deal, you may wonder? The Dresden universe lends itself well to short-story form, so it's cool that there are various stories out and about, but may not seem to be all that important to have them in one collection. But it kind of is, really, as these stories are canon. And events from them are referenced in the novels themselves. Not so much that you can't follow the plot of a novel without knowing all the short stories prior, but still referenced. Collecting all of the anthologies just to have access to these Dresden stories might be out of the realm of possibility for some fans, thus having the stories in one place is both handy and economical.

As it turns out, though, this isn't a complete collection of short stories. There are at least two that I know of that didn't make it in. Kind of annoying. But, the main series of novels is only about half-finished (according to interviews with Butcher himself), so I would imagine that more short stories would be forthcoming, and so perhaps eventually a second short-story anthology will come out, including the stories missing from Side Jobs. To make up for the lack of a few stories, though, this book does include a brand new novella, "Aftermath", which takes place immediately following (well, by "immediately following" I mean "within a couple hours of the end of") the most recent novel, Changes.

So how are the stories themselves? They are all quite good. I can't say that any gave the impression of "OMG!!! That was the best short story EVAR!", but neither were any of them disappointing. Well, with the possible exception of the aforementioned brand new novella. It wasn't poorly written by any means, but it went in a different direction than I would have thought, hoped, and wanted for a story immediately following the events of the last novel. Alas. I am already counting down the time until the next novel comes out (next April). But overall, these are all quite solid stories, some amusing, some exciting, some intriguing.

As an anthology in general, this has several things going for it that I appreciated. For one, the stories are presented in chronological order for the series. Not only that, it specifies exactly where in the Dresden timeline each story fits. One of the aspects that I have always liked about the Dresden series is that there is definite character growth and progress made in each novel. Some series are just "one more book" that in some ways are interchangeable (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), but with Dresden, knowing exactly when things take place is important.

As an aside, the majority of these stories take place later in the series, most between, say, the last four novels. No problems with that, but I, for one, would be interested in having more stories from early on in Dresden's wizarding PI career.

Another thing I appreciated is there is a brief introduction to each story by Butcher, giving the prompting for the genesis of such. It isn't deep insight necessarily, but a little commentary is useful and nice to read.

Basically, if you are a Dresden fan, you'll want this collection, hands down. If you're not, well, you should become one, but this collection might make for a good introduction to the series. It's a little hard to say on that one. I think Butcher does a good job with all of these stories (and his novels) of introducing characters for the uninitiated without getting to the point to really get irritating people who already know who people are and what is going on. Having said that, since the majority of these stories take place around the later books, there is a lot of previous character development that new readers won't know about. So I would still recommend starting from the beginning with the first novel, Storm Front -- although I would also advise keeping in mind that it was Butcher's first novel, so it has a few growing pains. 

  -- K. Burtt