Thread by @Delafina777

Okay, I'm snowed in, so I'm going to turn on my fireplace, make some nice tea and cinnamon toast, and live-blog my childhood favorite snowed-in book, The Dark Is Rising.

Okay, so first off, if you saw the terrible, terrible, no-good movie, wipe that from your brain. The book is elegant, beautiful, and a bit of children's literature that refuses to talk down to its readers.

I think I first read it when I was in 3rd or 4th grade (I distinctly remember writing fanfic for it when I got bored in class in 5th grade and had at that point reread it a bunch of times) and I still love it as an adult.

The mix of starkly beautiful language, mysterious pre-Christian British folk customs in modern-day England, classic plummy English Christmas, and really well-done characterization betwitched me.

It also had what I've come to realize was catnip for me when I was a kid--it had strong but not at all gruesome/abusive/etc. horror elements. It did that thing that I think Guillermo del Toro classified as the mark of truly great horror: a mix of terror and the sublime.

Side note about the movie, btw: I worked on a mini-ARG for it, and was SO EXCITED... and then they sent me the script and I basically just levitated in appalled shock.

The ARG was nice, though, I think. Created a cool website for Mitothin's antique business and everything. But yeah, reading the script kinda broke my enthusiasm for it.

But, y'know, you're getting paid so you still have to do your best.

So, for a long time I thought maybe Susan Cooper made some of the customs up, or adapted them a lot to work with the plot. And then I was at a bookstore in Wisconsin and came upon this 1959 book called Welsh Folk Customs.

As it turns out, she almost did the same thing with that book that Dan Brown did with Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which is take a nonfiction book and basically turn it into a novel. Unlike Dan Brown, she did a really good job.

So anyway, grab some tea and cinnamon toast and let's get started.

The opening is so EFFICIENT. Like, there's so much that it accomplishes: we get the family dynamics, James' characterization, why Will is already a sympathetic character, and something that's going to be a major component of the book: a sense of the space.

It's subtle here, but on the first page it's already creating a sense of ominous waiting. Grey clouds, snow waiting up there, ready to drop like the other shoe.

There is actually lit crit out there that talks about this, e.g. Jane Carroll's "Landscape in Children's Literature."

Will really wants snow for Christmas, which as an adult just makes me tired, but I remember when I was a kid and not responsible for, y'know, DEALING with it, I sympathized. There's something magical about snow. It makes the world quiet.

Sorry, not just Christmas, but his birthday. When he walks through the kitchen on his way out to feed the farm animals with James, the radio goes nuts, crackling. Small detail, also ominous.

That experience of walking out of a noisy, crowded, overheated interior out into the winter and that sudden quiet and refreshing cold is just *chef kiss.* I do miss it sometimes.

And again, building that sense of ominousness. But it's done almost gently. The clouds are waiting to drop snow. The radio is crackling. The animals are anxious.

So Will & James head over to their neighbor's to get hay, but as they walk away, the rabbits stare after them. And then we come to the rooks. They're going to be a theme. CROWS ARE OMINOUS.

James notes that they should get going, because it'll be dark soon--yet another little, natural detail, but it works with all the others to build tension. Then this happens, and the way it's described CREEPED ME OUT SO MUCH as a kid.

What I'm getting at is that all of this is very *subtle* for a children's book. Cooper trusts her readers to understand the mood she's building. And compared to other young adult books I was reading at the time, it was *delicious.* This next scene is a little masterclass.

One of the reasons I think the Da Vinci Code was so popular--one of the reasons conspiracy theories are so popular, too--is they make you feel like you can see secret meaning in what looks ordinary to other people.

This scene basically does what the book is doing--textual and meta harmony. Farmer Dawson doesn't talk down to Will. He addresses him (still uninitiated) like an adult, like he's in on something--and then there's poor James, the never-to-be-initiated, cheerful and oblivious.

And that last line's a doozy. Tonight will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining. Will isn't imagining it, and you, the reader, aren't either. (The text just gave you a little pat on the back for noticing the signs.)

(No way to know this at this point, but he's dark-eyed because he's been here since before the Saxons invaded.)

So Farmer Dawson gives Will something for his birthday, which is going to be very important, and we get nice sensory details in which this book delights (I could imagine, as a kid, what each of the signs FELT like to hold).

This, also, when I was a kid, was enormously effective--the idea that the ADULTS were anxious.

We also meet a couple other people at the farm: Old George, and Maggie the dairymaid. And whatever it is, they're all in on it.

And then they see the mysterious figure, and he gets attacked by the crows. It's presented as something nightmarish.

Will is dazed, almost. He finds a black crow feather on his shoulder and puts it in his pocket, very dreamlike. James is shaken, saying that rooks don't just attack people like that. And Will has a sort of psychic experience.

And then James just sort of... forgets. This creeped me out (pleasantly) as a kid too. And the language is lovely, the memory just running out of James's mind like water.

Will finds himself clutching the iron circle Farmer Dawson gave him. This time it feels warm.

We get a lovely, cozy dinner scene with Will and his very large family. And then Cooper takes one of those sort of weird moments of the sort I remember from being a kid and makes it into something more.

I remember having a very similar feeling several times as a kid--the idea that somehow having so many people focusing on you made you almost... supernaturally vulnerable.

Everyone agrees that Will is an old soul, there's some gentle humor, and then they discover that Will has indeed gotten his birthday snow.

Will goes to bed in his slant-roof attic room, that used to belong to his oldest brother, the soldier, who he's closest to. It's a lovely, cozy description, and he watches it snowing, and there's some great snow description too.

This passage has some more of those delicious sensory details (you can almost feel what the sign feels like to hold) and a clue, though you can't interpret it yet.

The cold is a warning. (Just like before, when it was warm, which was actually telling you WHO erased James' memory, but again, you don't know enough to interpret it yet.) I love when narratives do this subtly--plant these scenes that you're going to go OH! about later.

Will suddenly gets attacked by fear. And Cooper does a great job of making it seem like an attack. Just going to show you the whole spread here, because it's an impressive build (that feels *real,* lived-in).

Will's shriek brings his gentle, flute-playing brother Paul up to see what's wrong. Turns out the latch on the skylight broke, dumping snow all over him. Paul sends him to go sleep in Paul's bed for the night.

But the chapter ends on one more spooky detail. (The text works like music, replaying phrases to build and add more weight to them.)

And then we move from horror to the sublime. Will awakes with beautiful music echoing in his head as if he just woke up from a dream. As it turns out, though, he maybe woke up INTO a dream, or at least, into a world of dream logic.

He looks out the window and sees primeval forest. Oh, and the Thames, which I haven't mentioned, but has been winding its way through the text in the background. The sign feels warm now. His family is deeply asleep. He shouts at them to wake up, but nothing happens.

So he goes outside, and we get this gorgeous bit of scene-setting with a very dream logic closer (the logic of dreams is also the logic of magic here, real magic, inexplicable and almost miraculous, mythos and not logos).

Maybe this is something you can't know, at a bone-level, unless you grew up in the snowlands, but when the sun comes out on new snow, it is beautiful in a way that is exhilarating.

He hears hammering and follows the sound to a smithy (and oh, the smell of woodsmoke when it's snowing--again, the way very concrete sensory details are deployed here is a masterclass).

Next to the anvil is a beautiful black horse. And then a figure steps out of the shadows, and we slide back from the sublime to the spooky. (Pretty sure I've stolen "the brightness went out of the [day]" for something.)

There's another of these clues here that you won't be able to interpret until later, but it gives a sense to the observant reader that SOMETHING they don't understand has just happened.

When I talk about Cooper's elegance, I mean that her details are carefully chosen without seeming to be. You could spend a LOT more words on description and not convey places and feelings and reactions as well as she does.

In this case, it's important that:
--Will speaks first.
--John Smith hesitates before answering (and his hesitation seems... unhappy)
--The stranger has an accent.
--The stranger knows, rather than asking, Will's age.

You can't know, yet, as a reader, what's playing out there, but that's all in a bit of text that conveys that Will has a bad feeling about the stranger, who John is, what the stranger looks like, what John looks like, etc. Every word in that bit is pulling its weight+.

And here we get into old Celtic/folkloric riddle games, like Gawain, the Fisher King, etc. But Will actually passes this test: he doesn't greet the Rider, he doesn't break bread with him, and he doesn't accept a ride from him.

The Rider reveals himself to be Not Very Nice At All.

We learn some more about the smith, that the ominousness is a "they" and not just the Rider, and some of The Rules. Roads are magic, and immune to (evil?) magic.

Will asks the smith "My dude, WTF is all this about?" and the smith is all, "oh, are you so newly awake?" (very seventies-feeling, that) and tells him he can have breakfast now.

Will gets S̶h̶a̶d̶o̶w̶f̶a̶x̶ a horse. John greets the horse like a person.

John tells Will that the horse will carry him where he needs to go, but Will looks up at some "lazily circling" rooks and decides to go alone (dude, the rooks are not your friends). He notices the smith is shoeing the horse with symbols like the sign he got as a gift.

Will finds the Walker, who follows the pattern of everyone else Will has met this morning of talking to Will like he understands what's going on, which is actually an effective way of both doing exposition & propelling things forward, which are usually in tension with each other.

In this little exchange, we learn/confirm:
--Will is the "one" something
--He SHOULD know what's going on
--The rooks are in on it
--The Rider has people
--We're in the past
--Farmer Dawson is an/the Old One
--The thing Will has is called a sign

That's actually quite a bit of information to drop.

The Rider shows up, mockingly chides Will for leaving the road, and the sign gets super-cold. He threatens Will and hints at a bit more exposition, and the white mare rescues Will.

Things get trippy as the Rider chases them (a lightning storm, and more), and they get safely to the road, and Will notices a chalk circle the same shape as the sign. Will falls off the horse, and finds himself in front of some doors.

Oh, in case it didn't get quoted, by the way, the Rider is described at first as being red-headed. From "Welsh Folk Customs" (Trefor M. Owen):

The doors are awesome. They don't have handles, so Will puts his palms against them, hears that beautiful music he heard when he woke up, and they open.

We meet two characters who are going to be very important. There's a prequel to this book, Over Sea, Under Stone, which is sort of to the Dark is Rising like the Hobbit is to LOTR, which is (IIRC) the only place we get the man's real name. You will be able to guess, though.

But you're not going to find out who he is for a while.

Dude, don't blow out the shamash.

Wait, wrong culture, wrong holiday.

Will lights some candles in a sign-shaped candleholder, and the Lady tells him, "Well done." She smiles at him, and he feels very happy. He asks how the doors just stand on the hillside, by themselves, and...

Oops, sorry, attached the wrong screenshot. Here's the description of the man.

There are more clues there--that the doors are gone, so this place is safely sealed, and the shield, which should tell Will that this is a sanctuary, but like Percival, in this case, he misses the signs.

The man asks Will to describe what has been happening to him.

Like us, he recognizes that there are factions here and is trying to figure out who belongs to which.

Heh. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland%2… Another way in which this book doesn't talk down to its readers--it makes these allusions but doesn't explain them. It wants you to go figure it out on your own.

Will theorizes that the Walker isn't with the Rider & Co. because he was scared of them, and realizes that it's not the sign They are after, it's him. This is, I think, the biggest clue you're going to get to Merriman's identity.

Merriman explains to Will that he has the gift of the Old Ones and he has to learn to use it properly. Will directly asks who the Lady is, and gets... nothing.

Merriman puts a picture into Will's mind and has him describe it, then tells Will to think of an image. Note the familiarity there at the end. Will has been watched.

Will's like "Cool, you have telepathy!" and Merriman is like, "Dude, WE have telepathy" and Will doesn't want to believe it, so Merriman tells him to put out the candle with his mind, and Will decides to try to put out the fire in the fireplace because of course that's impossible

So it's "safe." There's no way the fire is going to go out, making him "safe and free from the dangers of power." Of course, the fire goes out.

And the description here is... just great. For once, there are characters that I actually BUY are hundreds, if not thousands, of years old.

Will relights the fire with his mind. And then Merriman gives him the high-level summary of what this is all about. (Also tells him that his power has been protecting him all these years, but now he knows so it can't do it unconsciously anymore.)

We get sort of a prophecy.

And then we get more prophecy, now in rhyme form!

And then we get a preview of the rest of the books in the series.

Then the Dark starts trying to lure him outside, first with the sound of a dog in pain (Will has two dogs at home that he's close to). A door takes shape in the wall. Merriman's like "Don't do it, man."

But then they make it sound like they have Will's mother and he rushes to open the door, but his forearm hits the sign at his belt and it's so cold that it brands him. The Lady heals him, and a "dreadful inhuman chorus of wailing" comes from outside.

We get our time limit. (Apparently Twelfth Night was once Christmas Day?)

Will, the Lady, and Merriman join hands and try to hold off the forces of the Dark, but then the original doors show up, and Will breaks the circle to run to them. Which is a bad idea.

It results in the sacrifice of the Lady. (The language of magic here is SO GOOD--comprehensible, but mysterious.)

More foreshadowing, but much more subtle this time.

They walk around, and Merriman tells Will when and where they are (right outside Huntercombe Manor, in Will's neighborhood, but 500 years ago). He shifts them to the present, noting he is back again "with mixed feelings."

We get more Rules of the game.

As soon as Will walks back into his house, he's returned to exactly the moment after he shouted "Wake up!"

Going to call it there for tonight, but man, you can learn a LOT about effective storytelling from this book. (And you could eat the language with a spoon.)