the dark is rising sequence by susan cooper

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. 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. 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.

The dark is rising sequence by susan cooper