He is a young boy who shifts between high magic and and the utterly, comfortingly ordinary fact of a joyful family Christmas. And yet he is still bound up in the warm happiness of carol singing and mince pies, and the bright promise of the tree and its presents. What is clear is that when he steps out into the great white brightness of snowfall the next morning, he can work magic, and is one of the Old Ones, a fighter in the age-old battle against the Lords of the Dark. But it is never fully explained what this feeling – 'as if some huge weight were pushing at his mind, threatening, trying to take him over' – really means, or what, precisely, happens to him that night. Īs the story goes on, it becomes clear that during this black night of fear some great change has been wrought in Will. Susan Cooper is one of the finest writers of our time. Read Over Sea, Under Stone next, then the rest of the 5 book series. It's all the more powerful because nothing really happens, beyond a skylight breaking under the weight of the beautiful, longed-for snow, and a rook's feather drifting in to Will's room. Harry Potter series was fun, but Dark is Risingseries is the real deal, full of accurate and beautiful Welsh and British mythology. Will lay terrified, shaking, feeling himself shake, yet unable to move.' For years I couldn't read this passage without feeling petrified myself, and making my own cosy cave of yellow light to stave off the terrors wrought by the imagination. The fear jumped at him for the third time like a great animal that had been waiting to spring. It is, oddly, the moment when Will switches on his bedside lamp that is the most telling (and the most recognisable, perhaps, to any of us who have once been afraid of the dark): 'The room was at once a cosy cave of yellow light, and he lay back in shame, feeling stupid.' Then: 'He switched off the light again, and instantly everything was even worse than before. It is a child's anxiety at the blank blackness redoubled stretched to its extreme, because it quickly becomes clear that there is something more to Will's terror than can be explained away by an appeal to the everyday. There's something extraordinary in the way Cooper describes this fear of the dark.

Susan cooper's the dark is rising