How to Murder Harry Potter
When Rachel was growing up in upstate New York, she was what she calls “a creepy girl child”—one prone to wild crying jags that often baffled her mother. Rachel was also, like something to close to all American 13-year-olds in the early aughts, an ardent fan of Harry Potter. She read the books, obviously. And once she had exhausted those, she turned to the internet, where she found a seemingly endless supply of stories about Harry Potter characters written by fans like herself.
Soon, Rachel was reading stories in which the characters did things they would never do in the books, or in which the characters found themselves in horrible situations. (Even more horrible than being forced to lead a magical army as teenagers.) One night, she sat down to a story about the nerd-heroine Hermione Granger (a witch born to non-wizard parents) falling in love with the über-blond villain Draco Malfoy (whose parents belong to the wizarding world’s equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan). The pair’s non-canon love story unfurled slowly and sexily over thousands of words, and then the ax dropped—literally.
