There's no time left for Quidditch, for pranks in the school corridors, for whispered confidences in the common-room. The time of Harry Potter the boy is over. The time of Harry Potter the desperate and woefully outnumbered man is here. And though he thinks he's ready to, he will face despair, disillusionment and more death than J.K. Rowling's advance warnings led us to expect.

After a brief final stay with his loathsome relatives, the Dursleys, who are last seen being spirited into protective custody, Harry joins his various friends and allies for a flight to safety. But any readers who expect the whimsical early chapters of most prior Potter novels are in for a surprise, as a terrifying mass attack by Death Eaters starts the volume off on an unsettlingly tragic note. And the hits keep coming: The death toll is not just a couple of names but an entire list of names, giving much of the book a bleak tone likely to enrage readers who thought that the series was already getting too dark as far back as Goblet of Fire.

Indeed, for much of the early going, Harry and his allies Ron and Hermione are alone, cut off from allies and with no idea what they're supposed to do next; their struggles, hiding in wilderness for days and weeks on end, beset not just by fear of Voldemort but by more pressing concerns such as finding food to eat, make some passages read less like previous Harry Potter than like the Rowling-prose equivalent of Cormac McCarthy's recent slow-starvation-after-the-holocaust best-seller The Road.

And if you think a little of that goes a long way, you're absolutely right.

An apocalyptic conclusion

Still, the action picks up as one breakthrough leads to the next and Harry's little band begins to make some headway, collecting the horcruxes that the vile Lord Voldemort has used to safeguard the various bits and pieces of his soul. It's no surprise that the action eventually comes back to Hogwarts, in an epic battle that encompasses all the students and all the bad guys, but the big surprise is just how bleak, dark and terrifying it all gets long before that point. Harry and Ron clash, their friendship stretched to the breaking point; some developments enter the realm of the heartbreaking and brutal; likable characters fall left and right; and Harry is left wondering whether the fallen Dumbledore ever saw him as anything but a weapon.

Readers who have followed the books since the beginning will find special enjoyment in the number of characters whose backstories pay off here. Ron's mom, Molly, has a killer stand-up-and-cheer moment. So does his prat of a brother, Percy. So does Hagrid's brother Grawp. So does Severus Snape (and how). Perhaps the best woo-hoo—that is, a moment that literally makes you jump up and down and say woo-hoo—comes late, from the much-put-upon Neville Longbottom. Yay, Neville!

The weakest part is the epilogue, "Nineteen Years Later." It gives us the fate of the (surviving) characters, which is, except for one neat payoff you won't read about here, pleasant and predictable in all the wrong ways; it's gratifying enough, we suppose, in that it's nice to get the happily-ever-afters, but as performed it has all the artistry of a kazoo solo after a symphony. And it fails to satisfy, in that it neglects other characters whose futures we would like to know about. We suspect that when this book is inevitably re-read, many fans will skip it.