This isn't my out-and-out favourite of Cooper's Dark Is Rising sequence – that honour goes to The Gray King, her spare, haunting Carnegie-winner, set in the Welsh mountains – but it remains, for me, the perfect Christmas read, in which the season's heat and dazzle is matched by the cold and dark that, in years gone by, it was designed to keep out. Throughout the book, the snow works as a metaphor for all of these different states: for Will's departing innocence, when it comes on his birthday, 'smooth and white and inviting' for the cold beauty of the Light when it glimmers and sifts for the threatening brutality of the Dark, when the blizzards don't let up and the element turns malevolent, pushing in through windows, piling up at doors. There's no question that the Light is the right side to be on, but the rightness at the heart of it is chilly and inflexible, obliged – as Will discovers to his horror – to choose the greater good over the fate of any single individual, time and again. The Dark Is Rising the second book in Susan Coopers superbly menacing Arthurian quintet, in which the forces of the Dark and the Light are pitched against each other in a battle for humanity. Throughout the book, Will moves between the warmth and safety of his family's soothing seasonal traditions of lighting the yule fire and decorating the Christmas tree, and the dark, uncharted territory, compelling but terrifying, of his new self, powerful but isolated. He heads out into the discovery that his 11th birthday marks the moment in which he steps into his destiny as one of the Old Ones: men and women of the Light who must prevent the Dark – personified in this book by a 'cloaked rider on a midnight horse' – from gaining power over the land.Īs well as a thrilling, flawlessly structured adventure (Will must find the six signs of the Light – circles quartered by a cross in wood, bronze, iron, water, fire and stone – before twelfth night, when the Dark will be at its peak) The Dark Is Rising is a perfect coming-of-age story. On the morning of his birthday Will wakes to find the world transformed, but not in the way he hoped: his family is locked in sleep, and outside the door, the snow covers not the roofs and lanes of his own century, but the dense, spreading forest that engulfed the land centuries earlier. But the dream quickly turns into nightmare.

The dark is rising by susan cooper