Beyond the book: page 1379 of Deathly Hallows...

The Latest Harry Potter Volume

(Image from Wikipedia)

Though still a little-known fact, the latest Potter volume contains more than 759 pages.

No, I don't mean those those seven blank pages nor the "About the Author" page, another blank page, the "About the Illustrator" page, or that last visible page, on art direction and the choice of font.

Nope, not those.

I mean the part of the book that extends into another dimension, much like Doctor Who's TARDIS, which is bigger on the inside than on the outside. In those pages beyond our earthly dimensions, Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows never seems to end.

It is, indeed, a hypertext, unbounded in all directions and linked to every other text in the universe, a veritable universe of discourse.

I've reached page 1379, where Voldemort fully melds with the Antichrist, something I've been anticipating for several volumes now as Voldemort has taken on ever-more-serpentine qualities and thereby grown ever-more Satanic. Turns out, then, that the entire anti-Potter faction among evangelicals has been utterly wrong the whole time about Rowling's supposed 'anti-Christian' magic. In these hypertextual pages, the Christian imagery grows ever more obvious. Those evangelicals who had opposed the Potter phenomenon for its 'pagan' worldview will just have to learn to read it in much the way that they've learned to read C.S. Lewis, seeing the deeper magic beneath the witchery and accepting the pagan details as vehicles for a Christian message, as Elisabeth Gruner has been arguing for some time.

Deathly Hallows is simply another expression for the valley of the shadow of death, so we should fear no evil...

Big Ho's "Potter spoilers" Spoiled!

Voldemort Invictus

(Image from Wikipedia)

Don't look at the Big Ho's "Potter spoilers" . . . unless you don't want to have your reading of Rowling's latest (and last) volume spoiled.

Yes, you heard me right, even if you did have to think about it.

But if you're currently being tempted to read the Big Ho's "Potter spoilers" -- which you can access immediately to gratify that temptation -- then don't read my blog entry any further because what comes next will spoil the spoilers. Here's the Big Ho's first 'spoiler':

"1. I was shocked that Hermione was killed off in the first twenty pages. That was totally unexpected. Wow."

Liar! I've read 175 pages, and Whiney Hermione ain't dead yet. However, there remain another 584 pages, and that fact leaves plenty of collective room for hope.

So . . . I'll continue to hope the worst for Hermione and the best for me, but I'm still angry at the Big Ho because I bought Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows solely to see Hermione get her comeuppance.

The Big Ho has five other "Potter spoilers" -- or should I say 'Potter soilers' -- given the Big Ho's predilection for a certain genre of humor -- but I've not read them yet. I read the Hermione 'spoiler' by chance as my eye happened to pause upon that particular day's entry before I realized what I was reading. Overjoyed to hear of Hermione's death, but not wanting to spoil any other unexpected plot developments, I immediately stopped reading the Big Ho and rushed out to a bookstore to grab the latest Potter and rush out again to start reading. My headlong rush was interrupted when the store clerks grabbed me and extorted money for a book that was already in my hands! Dammit! Don't Koreans know that "Possession is nine-tenths of the law"? That's one of those proverbial bits of practical wisdom that I learned as a kid along with other wise sayings like "Finders keepers, losers weepers." I guess that Koreans don't have any proverbs in their language, or they would know these things.

Anyway, I was soon rudely disappointed to discover that Hermione doesn't die . . . not in the first 20 pages, at any rate.

The truly unsurprising thing, of course, is Harry Potter's death. I was a bit taken aback to read of it in the first 20 pages, for one would expect the book itself to end at that point -- what with Voldemort victorious and all in this darkest of the Potter series -- but the book goes on and on and on as Voldemort and his Death Eaters hunt down and exterminate one Potter friend after another. Basically, the rest of the book appears to be a mopping up operation for the victorious forces of Voldemort, and I'm surprised that Hermione has survived so far.

Everybody knew that Potter had to die (so this isn't a plot spoiler) because Rowling had already announced that this latest volume would be the last in the series, tantamount to saying that Harry Potter dies.

So, this hairy Harry phenomenon will all be over soon, thank God! I do worry, ever so slightly, that Whiney Hermione might survive to fight on in subsequent volumes.

I certainly hope not, but if that should happen to happen, then I say that the time has come to join forces with the anti-Potter faction of evangelicals and ban these books!