I'll bet Dumbledore's painting in the Headmaster's office will have something to say.

I'll bet Dumbledore's painting in the Headmaster's office will have something to say.

God, I hope so.

I'm fine with the title. But somehow, upon hearing it, my DH has convinced himself that either Dumbledore is not dead, or that Snape is actually evil. I don't know how he's getting that from "Deathly Hallows," but whatever.

All I know is, my brain has become a sieve. I have to reread Order of the Phoenix before the movie comes out, and then Half-Blood Prince before Deathly Hallows is released, as a refresher.

I have to thank JKR for giving me a connection to my niece and two nephews. We ended spending a good portion of our Christmas Eve dinner discussing various aspects of Harry Potter, both book and movie versions (the 10-y.o. knew more about the films and was able to participate via that route).

The 13-y.o. niece is a big Sirius Black fan, and told me that she didn't see what the big deal was about Dumbledore dying. Well, she understood that he's a big wizard hotshot, but thought that Sirius's death was more important to Harry (also, he's "way cooler than Dumbledore!"). She's really looking forward to the OotP movie, as a result.

I love reading books that the boys are reading, too, and being able to discuss them (although the nine-year-old is honestly only watching the movies, which makes me sad -- I want him to read Order of the Phoenix now, or at least read it with him before the movie comes out, because there's so much *more* in the books). Also sharing them with my DH, because our reading tastes are wildly different, except where Harry/JKR are concerned.

I'm a huge Sirius fan, too, but Dumbledore's death is important in a different way. Sirius was an outlaw of sorts, living on the edge, blah blah, so his death wasn't such a surprise, whereas Dumbledore was teacher, mentor, touchstone, and de facto father to Harry. He also symbolizes so much good and wisdom, that his death seems like a door opening to Chaos and Heartbreak Ahead.

Dumbledore's death has extra oomph because you felt that he knew he was going down anyway, what with the withering, and he pretty much had to order Snape to do it. Damn, that's going to be cool to see on film. I wonder how filming it will change the impact of the scene, since the last book will be out and we'll know wheter Snape's a goody or a baddy.

From Wikisource, an article on Supernatural Horror by H.P. Lovecraft.

This section is titled "The Apex of Gothic Romance":

Horror in literature attains a new malignity in the work of Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), whose novel The Monk (1796) achieved marvellous popularity and earned him the nickname of "Monk" Lewis. This young author, educated in Germany and saturated with a body of wild Teuton lore unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, turned to terror in forms more violent than his gentle predecessor had ever dared to think of; and produced as a result a masterpiece of active nightmare whose general Gothic cast is spiced with added stores of ghoulishness. The story is one of a Spanish monk, Ambrosio, who from a state of over-proud virtue is tempted to the very nadir of evil by a fiend in the guise of the maiden Matilda; and who is finally, when awaiting death at the Inquisition's hands, induced to purchase escape at the price of his soul from the Devil, because he deems both body and soul already lost. Forthwith the mocking Fiend snatches him to a lonely place, tells him he has sold his soul in vain since both pardon and a chance for salvation were apprroaching at the moment of his hideous bargain, and completes the sardonic betray by rebuking him for his unnatural crimes, and casting his body down a precipice whilst his soul is borne off forever to perdition. The novel contains appalling descriptions such as the incantation in the vaults beneath the convent cemetery, the burning of the convent, and the final end of the wretched abbot. In the sub-plot where the Marquis de las Cisternas meets the spectre of his erring ancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there are many enormously potent strokes; notably the visit of the animated corpse to the Marquis's bedside, and the cabbalistic ritual whereby the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom and banish his dead tormentor. Nevertheless The Monk drags sadly when read as a whole. It is too long and too diffuse, and much of its potency is marred by flippancy and by an awkwardly excessive reaction against those canons of decorum which Lewis at first despised as prudish. One great thing may be said of the author; that he never ruined his ghostly visions with a natural explanation. He succeeded in breaking up the Radcliffian tradition and expanding the field of the Gothic novel. Lewis wrote much more than The Monk. His drama, The Castle Spectre, was produced in 1798, and he later found time to pen other fictions in ballad form--Tales of Terror (1799), Tales of Wonder (1801), and a succession of translations from the German.

Gothic romances, both English and German, now appeared in multitudinous and mediocre profusion. Most of them were merely ridiculous in the light of mature taste, and Miss Austen's famous satire Northanger Abbey was by no means an unmerited rebuke to a school which had sunk far toward absurdity. This particular school was petering out, but before its final subordination there arose its last and greates figure in the person of Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824), an obscure and eccentric Irish clergyman. Out of an ample body of miscellaneous writing which includes one confused Radcliffian imitation called The Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio (1807), Maturin at length evolved the vivid horror-masterpiece of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), in which the Gothic tale climbed to altitudes of sheer spiritual fright which it had never known before.

Oooh, look at Lovecraft's description of Vathek:

Vathek is a tale of the grandson of the Caliph Haroun, who, tormented by that ambition for super-terrestrial power, pleasure, and learning which animates the average Gothic villain or Byronic hero (essentially cognate types), is lured by an evil genius to seek the subterranean throne of the mighty and fabulous pre-Adamite sultans in the fiery halls of Eblis, the Mahometan Devil. The descriptions of Vathek's palaces and diversions, of his scheming sorceress-mother Carathis and her witch-tower with the fifty one-eyed negresses, of his pilgrimage to the haunted ruins of Istakhar (Persepolis) and of the impish bride Nouronihar whom he treacherously acquired on the way, of Istakhar's primordial towers and terraces in the burning moonlight of the waste, and of the terrible Cyclopean halls of Eblis, where, lured by glittering promises, each victim is compelled to wander in anguish forever, his right hand upon his blazingly ignited and eternally burning heart, are triumphs of weird colouring which raise the book to a permanent place in English letters. No less notable are the three Episodes of Vathek, intended for insertion in the tale as narratives of Vathek's fellow-victims in Eblis' infernal halls, which remained unpublished throughout the author's lifetime and were discovered as recently as 1909 by the scholar Lewis Melville whilst collecting material for his Life and Letters of William Beckford. Beckford, however, lacks the essential mysticism which marks the acutest form of the weird; so that his tales have a certain knowing latin hardness and clearness preclusive of sheer panic fright.

the cabbalistic ritual whereby the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom and banish his dead tormentor.

What an interesting use of the Wandering Jew motif. He might be held in contempt, but I get the impression that he is both powerful and beneficial (as one might be, who helps banish a dead tormentor).

Wow, you have to admire his bit on Poe for sheer Lovecraftian muchness:

Poet and critic by nature and supreme attainment, logician and philosopher by taste and mannerism, Poe was by no means immune from defects and affectations. His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humor, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognized and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feeling, that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the thirties and forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slopes of Saturn might boast.

"....the gaily painted mockery called existence" - yep, that's about right.

His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humor, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice

Pot, meet kettle.