During this time, all books were Harry Potter. There wasn’t a government edict or anything. It just happened over time. No one missed the dusting, although most people still owned real copies of the seven books. There’s just something about a real book.

The sacrifice of this development was, of course, all other books—meaning the end of biographies, slave narratives, and To Kill a Mockingbird.  Shakespeare festivals became Renaissance Fairs. For a while there was a poetry museum in Missoula, Montana, but it spawned a cult and was shut down.

A benefit of this development was that everyone could engage in conversation.  Awkward moments became unheard of, as inside jokes and allusions belonged to all. Anywhere in the world you could stand on a chair and shout, “10 points for Gryffindor!” and receive an appreciative cheer in response.

Public readings resurged as a popular pastime. Gone were those pretentious tweedsters droning on about some impotent, middle-aged man ogling the jailbait neighbor girl. Instead, readers would get up and declare something like, “Tonight I’m going to read from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Chapter Eight, pages 95-104.”  Everyone would gasp and laugh in the right spots.  Fifteen minutes later and on to the snacks!

Naturally, there was that one older gentleman, the one with an antique typewriter, who refused to Tweet as had his father before him, who declared this all a 1984 type situation.  “2 plus 2 equals 5!” he railed, no one getting his reference.

“Don’t be such a Snape,” said one of the two people who heard him, both of them instantly getting that reference.

“Clearly, he didn’t take The Math of Harry Potter! in college,” the other one said. (All classes at this time were The Science of Harry Potter! The Geography of Harry Potter!, Harry Potter and the Environment! etc., and the titles all ended in exclamation points.)

The curmudgeon didn’t realize his tragic flaw: his analogy was off. The Harry Potter takeover hadn’t been a result of government conspiracy but had come about through the people’s choice.  How could a people ever revolt against themselves?

This is not to say snafus didn’t arise. For instance, there was such a demand for family vacations and honeymoons in England, the country couldn’t withstand the traffic. China responded by building 50 exact replicas of the Harry Potter universe. The Chinese versions were so detailed that everyone forgot what England was and that’s where all the plastic bottles went.

The curmudgeon, increasingly desperate, turned to religion as a last resort. “What about the Greatest Story Ever Told?” he demanded, thinking something in there—resurrection, a giant whale, the prodigal son—might spark some interest.

“Most of us would say Prisoner of Azkaban, but a fringe element swears by Order of the Phoenix,” replied the cashier at his local grocery store, the only person who would indulge his odd rants. “You know, we don’t just read Harry Potter books, we also watch Dr. Who.”

The curmudgeon gave up and thus the one last person in the world who had not read the series picked up Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

The only other recorded case of dissent involved the descendent of a Brooklyn resident who started his own literary magazine. Butterbeer (that was his name, one word) held out for three years before shutting it down so he could “focus on other projects.” By this point, the idea of four houses had been abandoned and everyone was from Gryffindor.

In all, considering the potential pitfalls of a book monoculture, everything was going pretty well. There was variety. Fanfictioners wrote lengthy alternate versions where Harry got together with Hermione and Ron died instead of his brother, Fred. Diversity issues were resolved by making Harry one-thirtysecond Cherokee. Scholars determined Hagrid was Trans and his popularity skyrocketed.

Since no one read the Bible or the Quran there was peace in the Middle East. The Harry Potter books are basically about friendship and good triumphing over evil, which made for a positive influence on the world. Everyone agreed there could be worse things than a unified worldview based on these values. Anyone who couldn’t see the benefits was clearly some kind of asshole.

This utopia might have continued forever, or at least for a long while, but for a seventh grader named Luna McGonnigal from Spokane, Washington. Here’s what happened: a little rat-faced boy named Pettrigrew (predictable) made a joke based on everyone knowing about the The Marauder’s Map, whereby he tapped his penis with a pencil and swore, “I solemnly swear I am up to no good!”

Luna found herself inexplicably, unreasonably furious. Yes, dick jokes were irritating, but this was seventh grade, dick jokes were to be expected. What she felt deep inside but couldn’t articulate, was that everyone had grown so used to the idea of Voldemort’s eventual demise, they had forgotten that his presence was the reason for the story in the first place. The resulting lopsidedness caused people to have dissatisfactions that festered unrealized, which now erupted from young Luna. She strode up to the class library, picked up Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and hurled it across the room at Pettigrew, unwittingly referencing “Revelation” by Flannery O’ Connor.

“Jesus,” Luna said. “I am so totally fucking sick of these goddam Harry Potter books.”

Furious over the desecration and having repressed negative emotions for years, the rest of the class took the other six books and beat the girl to a pulp–horrific, gristly Lord of the Flies stuff, demonstrating that some classics really do endure.

Even so, this incident probably would have passed by but for a girl named Tonks Granger who took a video of the incident which went viral, leading to a large population needing to process their feelings over this seemingly non-narrative act but with no way to do so, since no one had read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. Then it turned out that a woman from Columbia had stashed her grandmother’s copy of Beloved by Toni Morrison in a beanbag chair. Inspired by Luna’s death, she began to write a magic realist story about a ghost that haunted a seventh grade class after an unspeakable incident and so the next literary era of Post-Hogwartarianism began.

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Kelly says: “I am the author of My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself (Press 53). My work has previously appeared in The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and even Defenestration. I am a Libra, Cancer rising, moon in Aquarius. My Enniagram is 6, The Loyalist, with a 5 wing, The Investigator. My aura is violet tinged with green. The love line of my palm reveals a sensitive nature with a weak heart. Graphology says I am disorganized, creative, impulsive, insecure, and emotionally removed.  Origins are somewhat Irish/French/German. Lapsed Roman Catholic. Right-brained.  When I was four, I ate a moth ball and had to have my stomach pumped or would have died. I recently moved from Southern Louisiana to Southern Utah.”