Lifestyle Features

The last Potter

What does the end mean for Harry’s strange Boston disciples?

By SHARON STEEL | July 24, 2007

Wizard bits: Odds and ends on the occasion of the final book's release. By Sharon Steel

Potter in the Phoenix
"Breaking the spell: Harry Potter’s story comes to an end — but will readers, or reading, ever be the same?" By Joyce Millman.

"Potter-schmotter: 25 fantasy films that lock horns, swords and wands with Harry Potter."By Ellee Dean and Maddy Myers.

Potter redux: The Chamber of Secrets steps up. By Carolyn Clay

There’s something about Harry: Evangelicals who are all worked up about Harry Potter's celebration of magic and the occult are on to something. The kid may just be queer, in the broadest sense. By Michael Bronski

Growth Spurt: Harry Potter Comes of Age. By Joyce Millman

Wild about Harry: Predicting your Weekend Reading. By Joyce Millman

Harry and the Potters: Rock in a Hard Place. By Elisabeth Donnelly

Lift Your Glass: Mike Newell’s Goblet of Fire. By Joyce Millman

Blood, Felt, and Rock and Roll: On the road with Harry and the Potters and Uncle Monsterface

Weird Science: Could be verse: poetry ripped straight from the headlines. By James Parker

Hairy Potter: Hormones submit to dreary Order. By Michael Atkinson

The end is never easy, is it? When it comes to the July 20 midnight release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — the last book in a series of seven that has taken author J.K. Rowling a decade to parcel out to her utterly whipped readership — the end is absolute agony.

Because, for some, the final period isn’t simply a punctuation mark, it’s the head of the final nail on the coffin — or the crucifix. Because Harry Potter isn’t simply Harry Potter. He’s also Odysseus, Don Quijote, Huck Finn, Peter Pan, Elvis, Luke Skywalker, Michael Jordan, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Jesus Christ rolled into one. With a scarf and a British accent.

And Harry’s classic boy-versus-baddies monomyth, cliché as it may be, so resonates with some — from the white-hot fan-core to the farthest fringes of the Pottermonium — that, when the last page is turned and the book is placed, reverentially, in its hermetically sealed humidor, it will mean so much more than just the end of the series: it will be the end of a way of life. Seriously.

There are no mere readers of these books anymore: only heretics and disciples. And, for whatever reason, many of those most prominent wizard followers live in and around Boston. Now that he’s gone, what are they going to do next?

Harry’s blue helmets
The unfortunate victims of the Darfur conflict have been ignored by President Bush, the United Nations, and, aside from a few well-meaning celebrities and local activists, the rest of the world, too.

But now Harry Potter is on the case.

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Can't escape Snape at LeakyCon
Sure, Figawi Race Weekend is a blast, but how many times in my life would I have the opportunity to mingle with more than 750 J.K. Rowling devotees? So, this past Memorial Day weekend, I decided to skip Nantucket and join the all-ages, international assembly of Potter-heads at Boston's Park Plaza Hotel for LeakyCon 2009.
Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
For teenagers, everything seems like the end of the world: popularity, school, love, family, treacherous conspiracies, the war between good and evil wizards.
Wizards and masterpieces
At “Harry Potter: The Exhibition” at the Museum of Science, when a robed attendant places the sorting hat on a visitor’s head and soon after a door whooshes open to reveal the Hogwarts Express, you find yourself filled with the kind of giddy expectation you feel when getting your hands on a Potter book the day it’s released.
Comics for Christ
Young Laurel Templeton spends her summer vacation “kidnapped by five cyborg flies and shrunk down to insect size so [she can] travel back in time with them to save the world from an evil spider.” You know, typical stuff.
From here to Aeternitas
On July 15, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 hits theaters, dealing the final Avada Kedavra to the biggest fantasy franchise of our generation.
Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One
When a movie begins with the Warner Bros. logo crumbling in decay and ends with a defiled grave, you know you've experienced an evening of magic.
Photos: One Night in Boston 2011
STUFF Magazine presents photos taken in Boston's streets over eight hours on the night of July 15, 2011; here are a few of our favorites.
Challenging Voldemedia
Is Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin working under the Imperius Curse?
Mutiny in Heaven
It is a truth now well established that the idea for a series of books about a schoolboy wizard did not , in fact, originate with its author, J.K. Rowling (as she has naively claimed), but was piped up red-hot and stinking from Below.
Jingle spells
Nothing screams Christmas like children dabbling with sorcery. Which is why Harry and the Potters' annual Yule Ball is such a howling success every year.
Wizard bits
Odds and ends on the occasion of the final book's release
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