When J.K. Rowling talked to readers, she would sometimes mention something that had happened in Harry Potter and watch a puzzled look cross the other person's face, as they wondered for a moment whether they had accidentally skipped twenty pages somewhere. The problem, as she once put it, was literally in her own head. Over the seventeen years she spent writing the series she developed dozens of storylines that never reached the books, and which seemed to her quite as real as the final cut. She called them ghost plots.
This book gathers nineteen of those stories and reconstructs each one from what Rowling herself said, wrote or put on display over two decades. The evidence is scattered across the edits she catalogued on her own website in 2004, the essays she published on Pottermore, a long run of interviews and live chats, and the manuscripts that went into the British Library exhibition in 2017. There is a Weasley cousin named Mafalda whose removal collapsed the middle of Goblet of Fire, and a vampire professor called Trocar who disappeared so early from the notebooks that his own inventor forgot she had created him. There is an ice cream man who was kidnapped in the sixth book so that Harry could rescue him in the seventh, a rescue that never happened and that left his creator feeling guilty about a death she describes as entirely her own fault. There is also an owl who was meant to catch the Golden Snitch and whose early death turns out to be the direct consequence of an editor asking for a change six books earlier.
Each chapter works through the same four questions, which are what the documentary record actually says, how the story would have fitted into the books we know, why it was cut, and where its pieces ended up. The last of those turns out to be the most revealing, because Rowling hardly ever deletes anything outright. Discarded characters hand their traits over to the survivors and abandoned devices come back several books later wearing a different shape.
Every claim in these pages is traceable to a primary source, and where the author speculates about how a discarded story might have worked, he says so. Written by the author of Secret History of the Wizarding Phenomenon, it is a book about the decisions behind a series that millions of readers know by heart, and about what happens to the stories a writer chooses not to tell. Read it and the published novels begin to look different, because underneath almost every scene there is an earlier and rougher version, and the surface reads as cleanly as it does only because somebody decided to take something away.
