There's less than a week till the next and, God willing, last Harry Potter book comes out, and I've made no secret about my utter disdain for this jejune fantasy kiddie lit. But I swear, all will be forgiven if Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ends right in the middle of a sentence, followed by like ten blank pages. Could you imagine the chaos reigning in streets? Grown-ups — not necessarily grown-ups with stellar literary analysis capabilities, but still — beat up their TiVos when handed this ambiguity, so I'd love to see a billion kids disillusioned with books in a way that all the cheesy pro-reading posters in all the libraries in the world couldn't fix. I would laugh and laugh and laugh at the children who've spent their whole lives with the series, never getting closure, because I'm mean like that. Man, that's a tough way to learn an existential lesson.

I would settle for an allegorical ending, humanity transcends its moral weakness for eternal bliss next to God. But that's not going to happen, because unlike in its far superior Narnia thematic progenitor, the hero of Harry Potter isn't a representative for humanity and because Rowling has the same lazy, and somewhat oligarchic, contempt for her readers that I have for her billion-dollar empire. It doesn't matter that it's a children's book where the ancillary characters die sometimes; for kids, the morals are necessarily as thin and the book itself is thick, and that makes any ending manipulative and cheap, as tacked-on as the inevitable sequels Harry Potter: The Next Generation, Harry Potter: Enterprise, and Harry Potter: Deep Space Nine.