DO ME A FAVOR AND KILL HARRY POTTER.

Authors John Irving and Stephen King have made their plea. “Please Rowling, don’t hurt ’em!” They actually didn’t plea in the MC Hammer fashion I just quoted but you get the idea. And as I ate my Frosted Flakes that morning, I couldn’t help but think these two authors (one of whom I am a big fan of – Irving) are absolutely nuts.

Harry Potter should die. Why should Rowling care about her fans anymore? She has more coin than you or I will ever see. She can do whatever she wants and she will still have that coin. She should care less what her fans think. Killing Harry Potter would harm her none. Sure, she’d probably get some angry e-mails and letters (if her fans even know how to write) and what not but that all will pass like Hurricane Katrina.

I was never much for Potter. I traveled to Milwaukee once with a friend of mine in 2003. She gave me a copy of the first book and said, “Read it on the plane, it’s good.” So I did that. I finished it rather quickly but it was exactly what I expected. Formulaic, clichéd, elementary, and boring. Nothing profound by any stretch of the imagination. But it was a quick read. And I think that was the appeal of it all. Harry Potter books were being scooped up by hundreds, thousands, of people who weren’t frequent readers or even had kids for that matter. These people didn’t really read all that much. With Potter, they finally found a book without pictures with lots of pages they could read, to impress their friends. And Rowling kept feeding this hunger too. Every Potter book that came out just got longer and longer and longer and longer. The last one could almost compete with War and Peace.

Now, I am not saying this about every Potter fan. I have many friends (including the one who told me to read it in the first place) who read outside of the Potter realm. And not just crap like Dan Brown excrement, I’m talking about other stuff, like Zinn or Vonnegut or Burroughs. They just read Potter to give their minds a rest.

Potter could never give my mind a rest though. I remember this feeling I got while reading that first book those many years ago – I sort of grew angry. Millions of people (many of them were adults) were reading this book about this silly little whiny kid with a lightning-shaped scar while hundreds, even thousands, of other books of importance were going unnoticed.

As time passed on, every time I heard the words ‘read’ and ‘book’ in the same sentence, people were talking about Potter (if they weren’t talking about Dan Brown of course). I’d always try to intervene and ask them if they read the new Palahniuk and they look at me like, “How dare you not speak of childhood sorcery here.”

Ever see those late night Jesus channels a few years ago where that fat dude was spraying this business about Harry Potter, witchcraft, and how this little wizard could ruin your family and its morals? That guy used to make me laugh. He had no idea what he was talking about.

Also, think about how good this story would be. Lovers of Harry Potter have concentrated hard about what he was going to do next and what kind of adventures would find their way to him. Think about all of the so-called ‘interesting’ things he has done since he first arrived at Hogwarth’s. Now imagine, if all of that was done for nothing, because he died.

I get goose-bumps just thinking about it. I only wish it happened sooner (if it even happens at all).