USA WEEKEND
By Brian Truitt

(King) said he doesn’t know how much of an influence he had on Meyer, but he does know that Rowling read his stuff when she was younger. “I think that has some kind of formative influence the same way reading Richard Matheson had an influence on me,” King explains.

“People always say to me, ‘Well, what about H.P. Lovecraft?’ And the thing was, you read Lovecraft when you were a kid but I never felt that he was speaking my language. It was chillier than my heart was, and when Matheson started to write about ordinary people and stuff, that was something that I wanted to do. I said, ‘This is the way to do it. He’s showing the way.’ I think that I serve that purpose for some writers, and that’s a good thing. Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

But then King recalls that when his mom was alive, she read all the Erle Stanley Gardner books, the Perry Mason mysteries, obsessively when he was growing up. “He was a terrible writer, too, but he was very successful,” King says. “Somebody who’s a terrific writer who’s been very, very successful is Jodi Picoult. You’ve got Dean Koontz, who can write like hell. And then sometimes he’s just awful. It varies. James Patterson is a terrible writer but he’s very very successful. People are attracted by the stories, by the pace and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, it’s very clear that she’s writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It’s exciting and it’s thrilling and it’s not particularly threatening because they’re not overtly sexual. A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that’s shorthand for all the feelings that they’re not ready to deal with yet.”

Rowling, 42, admits she has ‘weak moments’ when she feels she will pen another novel about the boy wizard.

One of her biggest fans – her 14-year-old daughter Jessica – has already put pressure on her to revisit the character.

And her younger children – David, four, and Mackenzie, two – are likely to join the clamor for another novel as they discover the Potter books.

However, if an eighth novel were to be written, Rowling concedes it is unlikely that Harry would be the central character.

She finished the seventh book in the series – Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – last January.

At the time she thought she was ending a 17-year association with the boy wizard.
But in an interview with Time magazine, which put Rowling at No 3 in its Person Of The Year list, she said: “There have been times since finishing, weak moments, when I’ve said ‘Yeah, all right’ to the eighth novel.

“If – and it’s a big if – I ever write an eighth book, I doubt that Harry would be the central character. I feel I’ve already told his story.

“But these are big ifs. Let’s give it ten years.”

In the meantime, Rowling is working on two writing projects – an adult novel and a “political fairy tale” – and is involved in charity work.

By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK – J.K. Rowling and the maker of the “Harry Potter” films are suing a small publisher in Michigan over its plans to release a book version of a popular Web site dedicated to the boy wizard.

The suit, filed Wednesday by the author and Warner Bros. in federal court in Manhattan, claims that RDR Books will infringe on Rowling’s intellectual property rights if it goes ahead with its plan to publish the 400-page “Harry Potter Lexicon” on Nov. 28.

According to the publisher, the book contains much of the same material already found on http://www.hp-lexicon.org, a fan-created collection of essays and encyclopedic material on the Harry Potter universe, including lists of spells and potions found in the books, a catalog of magical creatures, and even a “who’s who in the wizarding world.”

In the past, Rowling has expressed support for such fan-driven efforts and has singled out the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site and its editor, Steve Vander Ark, for high praise.

But in the lawsuit — filed on Halloween — Rowling claimed that the print version of the Lexicon would improperly interfere with her plans to write her own definitive Harry Potter encyclopedia, one that would include new material not in the novels.

“I cannot, therefore, approve of ‘companion books’ or ‘encyclopedias’ that seek to preempt my definitive Potter reference book for their authors’ own personal gain,” Rowling said in a news release issued by Warner Bros. The film giant owns all the intellectual property related to the Potters books and movies.

RDR Books Publisher Roger Rapoport said the suit dismayed him but vowed that he wouldn’t allow it to block plans to release the Lexicon next month. He described the book as a “critical reference work” and dismissed any notion that it could compete with any official encyclopedia written by Rowling.

Rapoport said Vander Ark was a middle school librarian who started the Web site in his spare time in 2000, then watched its popularity grow to the point where Rowling herself gave it a Fan Site Award in 2004.

“He cannot understand why she wouldn’t be supportive now,” Rapoport said.

Warner Bros. has involved Vander Ark in its Potter marketing campaigns in the past. An interview with Vander Ark is even slated to be included in the special features section of the next Harry Potter DVD, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”

An e-mail seeking comment that was sent to Vander Ark at an address on the Web site was not immediately returned.

The lawsuit doesn’t seek action against the Web version of the Lexicon, but criticizes it for numerous sections that it said “regurgitate Ms. Rowling’s original creative expression with minimal additional commentary.”

The seventh and final installment in Harry’s adventures, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” was published in July. The seven books have sold nearly 400 million copies and have been translated into 64 languages.

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On the Net:

The Harry Potter Lexicon: http://www.hp-lexicon.org/

RDR Books: http://www.rdrbooks.com/

Warner Bros. Harry Potter site: http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/

By Hillel Italie, AP National Writer

NEW YORK – With author J.K. Rowling’s revelation that master wizard Albus Dumbledore is gay, some passages about the Hogwarts headmaster and rival wizard Gellert Grindelwald have taken on a new and clearer meaning.

The British author stunned her fans at Carnegie Hall on Friday night when she answered one young reader’s question about Dumbledore by saying that he was gay and had been in love with Grindelwald, whom he had defeated years ago in a bitter fight.

‘”You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me,’” Dumbledore says in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final book in Rowling’s record-breaking fantasy series.

The news brought gasps, then applause at Carnegie Hall, the last stop on Rowling’s brief U.S. tour, and set off thousands of e-mails on Potter fan Web sites around the world. Some were dismayed, others indifferent, but most were supportive.

“Jo Rowling calling any Harry Potter character gay would make wonderful strides in tolerance toward homosexuality,” Melissa Anelli, Webmaster of the fan site http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org, told The Associated Press. “By dubbing someone so respected, so talented and so kind, as someone who just happens to be also homosexual, she’s reinforcing the idea that a person’s gayness is not something of which they should be ashamed.”

“‘DUMBLEDORE IS GAY’ is quite a headline to stumble upon on a Friday evening, and it’s certainly not what I expected,” added Potter fan Patrick Ross, of Rutherford, N.J. “(But) a gay character in the most popular series in the world is a big step for Jo Rowling and for gay rights.”

Dumbledore may now be the world’s most famous gay children’s character, but he’s hardly the first. “And Tango Makes Three,” a story by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell that features two male penguins raising a baby penguin, topped the American Library Association’s latest list of books attracting the most complaints from parents and educators.

In 2005, PBS decided not to distribute an episode of “Postcards From Buster” that had been criticized by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings for including lesbian characters. The Potter books themselves have long been threatened with removal from school and library shelves, with some Christians alleging that the series promotes witchcraft.

In Rowling’s fantasy series, Gellert Grindelwald was a dark wizard of great power who terrorized people much in the same way Harry’s nemesis, Lord Voldemort, was to do a generation later. Readers hear of him in the first book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” in a reference to how Dumbledore defeated him. In “Deathly Hallows,” readers learn they once had been best friends.

“Neither Dumbledore nor Grindelwald ever seems to have referred to this brief boyhood friendship in later life,’” Rowling writes. “However, there can be no doubt that Dumbledore delayed, for some five years of turmoil, fatalities, and disappearances, his attack upon Gellert Grindelwald. Was it lingering affection for the man or fear of exposure as his once best friend that caused Dumbledore to hesitate?”

As a young man, Dumbledore, brilliant and powerful, had been forced to return home to look after his mentally ill younger sister and younger brother. It was a task he admits to Harry that he resented, because it derailed the bright future he had been looking forward to.

Then Grindelwald, described by Rowling as “golden-haired, merry-faced,” arrived after having been expelled from his own school. Grindelwald’s aunt, Bathilda Bagshot, says of their meeting: “The boys took to each other at once.” In a letter to Grindelwald, Dumbledore discusses their plans for gaining wizard dominance: “‘(I)f you had not been expelled we would never have met.’”

Potter readers had speculated about Dumbledore, noting that he has no close relationship with women and a mysterious, troubled past.

“Falling in love can blind us to an extent,” Rowling said Friday of Dumbledore’s feelings about Grindelwald, adding that Dumbledore was “horribly, terribly let down.”

Dumbledore’s love, she observed, was his “great tragedy.”