It is the second in Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence.
I utterly adored the Dark is Rising sequence as a child.
There's a mountain called Cadair Idris, which plays a very central role in The Dark Is Rising sequence.
Susan Cooper's evocative The Dark Is Rising sequence charts a battle between the forces of light and dark.
In the early 1970s, books like Lord of the Rings and The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper were all the rage.
Among Americans, delayed gratification was the more popular approach, thus supporting the psychologists' hypothesis that Americans prefer a rising sequence in life.
The Dark Is Rising sequence was written mostly in the United States but it is intensely British, because my imagination refused to leave its homeplaces in England and Wales.
In other words, this book is a loving, fast-paced pastiche of such novels as the "Dark Is Rising" sequence, by Susan Cooper, in which plucky children on holiday, wearing knee socks, struggle valiantly against a mystical evil, usually underground.
The accepted wisdom is that Americans prefer a rising sequence in life – that is, for stuff to get better, as opposed to starting out good and staying the same, or starting out fantastic and becoming less brilliant.
Vital to the modern moment, too, are the novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; especially Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Owl Service (1967), and Cooper's dazzling The Dark Is Rising sequence, published between 1965 and 1977.
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.
