“When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back”

Many books have the feeling for me of being linked to a particular season or time of year, but very few link as closely to a specific time than Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising. It begins on Midwinter’s Eve, the day before Will Stanton’s eleventh birthday, and four days until Christmas. It ends on Twelfth Night. It is steeped in rituals of that period of time.

“’The Walker is abroad.’” Mr. Dawson tells Will on a birthday eve that has been strange and eerie, and then: “This night will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining.’” I remember feeling as if my hair stood on end the first time I read those words, and even now, so many years and so many rereadings later, that effect is still there.

Will is an Old One, part of the forces of the Light who stand against the Dark. He is the Sign-Seeker, and on that eve of his eleventh birthday, he is coming into his power. It is a fraught, liminal time, both terrifying and wonderful. And when I was a child, first reading this book, there was nothing I wanted more than to be an Old One.

Being an Old One meant magic, yes, but magic that somehow felt true to me, like I thought magic should be like. It should be the kind of thing that was terrifying as well as wonderful, because that would mean it had real power. It should raise the hair on the back of your neck and sometimes be too much to deal with. It should even, I thought, sometimes be as cold and pitiless as Merriman’s treatment of Hawkin, that had such repercussions through time and through the story.

It was also magic that was based in knowledge. Will’s reading of the Book of Gramarye gave him an extraordinary amount of knowledge, and the magic that went with that. Books had always been a kind of magic to me and I was good at books in a way I wasn’t good at many other things. So not only did that magic feel right, it felt possible. If I was called, I could answer.

It’s a book that still feels magical to me. It is magic that still, to me, feels as magic should.

I was struck, this reading, by how many of my fascinations as a writer find their origin in this book, and in this series. (The Grey King and Silver on the Tree, with their rich entwining with the Arthurian mythos were also immensely formative.) Not in the sense of shock, more in the sense of, “Oh, this too? Of course it was here.” And maybe that’s a sort of magic, too. That lasting spell, emerging in new stories.

All quotations are from The Dark Is Rising. The links are affiliate links, which means if you order books through them, I may receive a small amount of money.