Face it: come 12:01 a.m. July 16, Jesus is once again going to be kicked unceremoniously into second place by a heretical pubescent, and his creator, having recently surpassed the Queen of England, will become wealthier than God. You should get on her good side.

Harry's murdered magical mentor is given the coveted voiceover-adviser role (ch. 31, "The Curse - Reversed!"), encouraging Harry to win the big battles he has no business winning, with stupid zingers that sound like "use the Force". And if you're interested in pursuing that line of influence, I'm not going to give it all away - but think: Voldemort, long-ago killer of Harry's parents, causing him to be shacked in the boonies, like another lucrative hero of note...or dark father himself??

Do you remember what happened in The Sorcerer's Stone? Very little, actually, from the perspective of the last two tomes. Harry is revealed to be a wizard. Harry visits Diagon Alley. Harry goes to school and solves a surprisingly minor mystery. Harry returns home for the summer.

And yet it was intoxicating, just to explore Rowling's weird space at leisure, without the rush of Voldemort predation or dark prophecies from the past. Is magical Hogwarts being displaced by something as mundane as World War II? It wouldn't be the first such conquest; some charged The Lord of the Rings with being a thinly-veiled allegory of the same conflict. It's also, to judge from the trailer, the direction in which the Star Wars machine is lumbering. Even His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman's fascinating trilogy that was held up as the thinking boy's Harry Potter, succumbed in the end to a strange version of the apocalypse.