Running Grave Placeholder Post, Number Five!
It’s something of a Publication Week tradition here at HogwartsProfessor to provide an online space for Serious Strikers to share their discoveries as they find them, an alocal place for specific topics we have explored here in the past. It’s a community gathering place — and it creates a record of findings for topics that otherwise become hopelessly jumbled. The seven I am posting for Running Grave are:
- The Gaffes
- Deathly Hallows Parallels
- Cuckoo’s Calling Parallels
- Lethal White Parallels
- The Ghosts
- Literary Alchemy
- The Occult
Why ‘Ghosts’? Because Rowling-Galbraith, a la favorite author Nabokov and her own oft-repeated beliefs about the immortal soul, goes to some pains to populate her stories with shades of persons-past. In Harry Potter, the ghosts were comic (for the most part!), visible, and all but ubiquitous around Hogwarts. In Cormoran Strike, the shading is much more subtle but at least as important. See my ‘The Ghosts Haunting Troubled Blood‘ for an introduction to this subject and Louise Freeman’s subsequent posts about the specters just out of sight in Cuckoo’s Calling and in Lethal White,
Ghosts promise to be at least as big a deal in Running Grave; the excerpts of the first eleven chapters released and then recaptured pre-publication make this a surety. Beside the ghosts called down by or conjured up by the religious cultists, though, what evidence do you see of, say, Leda Strike’s influence from beyond the veil? Aunt Joan? Have at it in the comment boxes below!
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