Top Five Best Casual Vacancy Reactions

The background

Have you been living in the Three Broomsticks recently? Because that’s the only place you’d be able to be and not have heard about J K Rowling’s new book, The Casual Vacancy. Of course, it’s already spawned a raft of jokes and responses.

1. Huffington Post put up the first page of The Casual Vacancy:

“When Barry Fairbrother died he was 43. I said Barry, not Harry. Just so you know. Anyway, when Barry Fairbrother died it came as a terrible shock to the whole town of Pagford, a seemingly idyllictown with a cobbled market square and a school for wizards. I mean, an ancient abbey. It had an ancient abbey, no wizards. No, none. An idyllic town it might have seemed but behind that happy, English façade had always been a town at war with Lord Voldemort. No. With itself. A town at war with itself.”

2.  Miraculously Unguarded Vagina

The adult phrase, quoted in a New Yorker profile of J K Rowling before The Casual Vacancy was published, has caused many to wonder what Harry Potter and the Miraculously Unguarded Vagina might be like. “Put your wand away, Harry!”

3. The Vacant Casualty

Where there’s a winner, there’s a spoof, and Patty O’Furniture (not his real name) has got in there already with The Vacant Casualty, which sees “the English town of Mumford, where all is quiet, apart from the man with the axe in his back who is staggering down the street, leaving a vacancy on the Parish Council. It features Detective Inspector Bradley, a ‘plodding buffoon, incapable of detecting his own backside,’ who teams up with a writer researching a detective novel, and together they blunder towards the identity of the ‘vacant casualty,’ hoping to get to the truth before everyone in the town is murdered,” reported Hypable.

4. Sickipedia, as usual, proved useful:

“‘JK Rowling writes first book for adults’. Nonsense. I have loads of adult books, all of them written by other authors.”

“JK Rowlings [sic] new book ‘The Casual Vacancy’. Must be about the Chelsea managers [sic]  job.”

5. Cover art

Hypable went so far as to design some covers for the Harry Potter books in the style of The Casual Vacancy. They’re quite good.