Predictions are flying across the Web and out of bookstores, where titles like "Mugglenet.com's What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7," "The End of Harry Potter?" and "The Great Snape Debate" spew theories about who will die, who will get together with whom, and who is really good or evil.
At the same time, with little more than three weeks to go before "Deathly Hallows" goes on sale at 12:01 a.m. on July 21, some people claiming to have actual knowledge of the book's plot are posting ostensible spoilers online. At one site, for instance, what appears to be a page from a manuscript appears, showing one paragraph outlined in red, suggesting that one of the most morally enigmatic characters in the series dies in the final book, with a few bars from the chorus of "Tarzan Boy" by Baltimora playing on an endless loop in the background.
And just last week, a self-proclaimed hacker calling himself Gabriel The Leaky Cauldron (leakynews.com), the site's hosts have posted a policy on spoilers: "DON'T DO IT."
"We just don't want someone taking what J. K. Rowling has earned away from her, which is the right to tell us where these mysteries end," said Melissa Anelli, the Leaky Cauldron's Webmaster, in a telephone interview. "She's worked really hard for 17 years on this series, and it's about time she reaps the satisfaction of bringing the culmination of her story to the fans herself."
In a posting dated May 14 on Rowling's own Web site, jkrowling.com, the author thanks Anelli for The Leaky Cauldron's spoiler policy, and added her own plea: "I want the readers who have, in many instances, grown up with Harry, to embark on the last adventure they will share with him without knowing where they are going," she wrote.
Attempts to spoil the ending are not new, of course. Four years ago, before the publication of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," the fifth book in the series, The Daily News bought a copy of the book at a Brooklyn health food store four days before publication and ran a graphic image showing two pages of the book. Rowling sued The Daily News for $100 million, and the suit was settled out of court.
Hosts of MuggleNet.com, another of the biggest Potter fan sites, learned about the death of Sirius Black, Harry's godfather, a few weeks before "Order of the Phoenix" was published, when someone sent in some scanned pages pilfered from a manuscript. And before "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth book in the series, was published two years ago, someone reportedly working on a Malaysian military base e-mailed a summary, the first page of every chapter and the whole final chapter to The Leaky Cauldron, revealing that Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, the boarding school where Harry and his friends train in wizardry, dies at the end of the book.
"There are usually a few people who get their hands on a book and get some rush in spoiling the details for us," said Emerson Spartz, MuggleNet's founder and Web master. "They get some sick satisfaction that they're sticking it to the man."
At least one cynical fan sees the current crop of spoilers as a ruse by the publishers to increase sales.
"I think it was a ploy by someone inside to get more hype about the book and get more money off of it," Joy Viceroy, 16, said of last week's Gabriel incident. Viceroy, an avid fan of the series who has read each book multiple times, was waiting in line on Saturday at a public library branch near Cleveland to board the Harry Potter Knight Bus, a purple triple-decker brought in by Scholastic, Rowling's United States publisher, to stoke up prepublication fervor.said he had broken into the computers of Bloomsbury, the series's British publisher, and discovered the identities of two characters killed at the end of the book, though the claim was widely discounted.
While fans take endless delight in spinning their own theories, bringing Talmudic fervor to the analysis of clues dropped throughout the previous books and in interviews with Rowling, they tend to oppose spoilers violently.
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