The Harry Potter machine is starting to gear down, with JK Rowling beavering away on the final Harry Potter book and Daniel Radcliffe preparing himself to take his clothes off and blind horses with a metal stick.

But there are still people who just can't let go of Harry Potter, especially in the face of rumours that JK Rowling is going to kill Harry Potter at the end of book seven. And it just so happens that one of those people is horror author and all-round kooky gent Stephen King, who suggested that JK Rowling just gets Harry Potter to kick a dog to death at the end of the book instead. At least we think he was getting at.

Change is a natural, unstoppable force. Things happen, people move on. After JK Rowling has finished writing the last Harry Potter book, there'll be no more Harry Potter for anyone – at least until Rowling realises that anything else she writes about won't make as much money. Even Daniel Radcliffe, the Harry Potter boy, has turned his back on the wizard in order to free up more time for his naked horse stabbing pursuits. 

And soon you'll all be getting nostaligic about Harry Potter, or at least the time that Harry Potter was alive, since JK Rowling is getting ready to kill Harry Potter off at the end of the last book. Rowling has already hinted that two characters will snuff it in the final Harry Potter book, but that's two too many for horror author Stephen King – a man who has killed way more characters than JK Rowling could ever dream of.

This all came about when JK Rowling took her diamond-studded panda-semen fuelled jetpack out for a trip to New York for a Q&A and charity reading with Stephen King and John Irving, an event which quickly turned into a discussion about whether or not Harry Potter would croak at the end of book seven. Stephen King said he wanted Harry Potter to live, before pre-empting the backlash Rowling will get if she kills Harry Potter by telling a story about a man in his book kicking a dog to death:

"I don't want him to go over the Reichenbach Falls… You want to be nice and say 'I'm sorry you didn't like that,' but I'm thinking to myself number one, he was a dog not a person, and number two, the dog wasn't even real. I made that dog up, it was a fake dog, it was a fictional dog, but people get very, very involved."

As for JK Rowling herself, she was predictably cagey about the whole subject:

"We're working towards the end I always planned but a couple of characters I expected to survive have died and one character got a reprieve. I understand why an author would kill a character from the point of view of not allowing others to continue writing after the original author is dead."

That's not the only reason why JK Rowling seems so keen on killing Harry Potter – anything to stop all those idiots sending her bits of paper all the time.

Read more:

Don't kill Harry Potter, US authors urge Rowling – Reuters

[story by Stuart Heritage]