Omnibus1967

(himself):
I think what I liked from the first about Harry Potter was that mix of - um - I won't say fantasy, because I think of it as a dirty word, and fantasy doesn't really work unless it's grounded in reality, and it's the reality that appealed to me in a sense. What's woven into them is a true history of the English folkloric tradition of magic. She [J.K. Rowling] hasn't made up a magic world which is simply a great wishlist, a Disney-esque fantasy, 'well if you have a dream it's going to come true,' because Harry Potter doesn't present a world like that. It's connected, and comes out of the whole fabric of English folkloric mythology. And I'm not in any way trying to push her into a high literary genre that she herself I'm sure wouldn't claim to belong to. It's merely that that's why it works, because things don't work if they are a result of feeble-minded fantasy. She's a tough writer; she won't compromise on what she sees as being right just in order to worry about what might frighten children. I think it's a function of literature to give children nightmares, just as it's a function of, you know, the biological world to give them measles. If they don't get their nightmares when they're twelve, if they don't wrestle with the dread of the unknown, then when it comes later in life that's when you're really in for trouble, just as mumps at thirty is a much bigger deal than mumps at eight. So you're kind of [laughs] doing the children a favor.