Killing your characters

After speaking about the new Harry Potter movie and the last book of the series that I'm awaiting so eagerly I started to consider the idea of killing your favorite characters. I know readers normally carver for round endings where everything is solved and they can leave the book with a sense of relieve, imagining life in books as more adventurous but that always ends nicely for the main characters. They end up happily married, or achieving the goals they had previously stated.

I don't know if it would be a sound idea to have evil win over good. I think that this novel, short story or whatever would lack something, the reader would be disappointed but as an exercise is so appaeling to me that I'll try to kill my main character in a short short story. If the idea is somewhat publishable I'll try to post it here.

Till then I leave you with the idea to question yourself. Is it possible to kill your main character and, at the same time, make a novel pleasent to the reader. Let's try and play a bit with language!