Let the Harry Potter Book 7 death watch begin.
Author J.K. Rowling told a London TV show this week that in the seventh and final installment of her fabulously successful Harry Potter series, she has found herself adjusting the story to spare one character but to kill two others as the complicated plot plays out.
“One character got a reprieve. But I have to say two die that I didn’t intend to die,” she said on the “Richard & Judy” talk show. “A price has to be paid. We are dealing with pure evil here. They don’t target extras do they? They go for the main characters. Well, I do.”
Rowling said she wrote the final chapter to the final Potter book in 1990, before she even had a publishing deal for the first. She has been aiming her multivolume saga toward that resolution ever since, filling in the richly detailed back story (and writing herself out of corners) along the way.
Within moments of Rowling’s talk show appearance, fans started buzzing about the fates of favorite characters.
The fan-run Leaky Cauldron (leakynews.com), an extensive Potter Web site honored by Rowling herself, posted an online poll to guess which character got the reprieve. At the 4,152-vote mark, the enigmatic Professor Severus Snape was slightly ahead of bad boy Draco Malfoy in the “Saved!” category, followed by Harry, Professor Remus Lupin, Neville Longbottom and Ron Weasley.
Over at the “Harry Potter Dead Pool” on my Pop Machine blog (chicagotribune.com/popmachine), the early voting has Snape and the lovably large Rubeus Hagrid as the characters most likely to bite the dust in Book 7. You can try your hand at unfogging the future too. Tell us what you think happens in the final Harry Potter book. Who lives and who dies?
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Send your ideas to ctc-tempo@tribune.com. Please include your name and town. We’ll print the best.
