Upwards of 1,000 people from around the world have expressed interest in the group, and the hashtag is already vibrant with content from rereaders of the novel as well as those who are approaching it for the first time. Yes, as it turns out, and to quite a lot of people. To be honest, I was also skeptical of enough widespread interest in them to merit a real-time conversation: did The Dark is Rising (and its sequels and prequel) really appeal to anyone beyond a handful of apostate neopagans (me) with a taste for Welsh orthography and dreary landscapes (also me)? I mean, these books were part of my mythology, constellations in the zodiac of my interior life. I confess that when I first saw the hashtag, I bristled indignantly, as one always does when accepting that a “secret” is actually public (and old news).
Each day, Macfarlane and Bird plan to share at least one question to guide discussion, and participants are encouraged to “share their memories of reading TDIR, as well as photographs, artwork, poems, music and other responses inspired by the novel.” By all appearances, nostalgia - the timely revisiting of a favorite novel - is the main motivation for the project. 5–6, in reference to Twelfth Night, on which the novel’s narrative ends. The date coincides with the beginning of the novel, one day before the 11th birthday of Will Stanton, the novel’s protagonist and the final initiate of an ancient order of benevolent immortals. Organized by writer and Cambridge professor Robert Macfarlane and poet Julia Bird, the reread will commence Dec. Mobilizing the imaginations of the resistance is likely not what the group’s organizers had in mind for #TheDarkIsReading, and certainly not what I thought when I first learned about it. Reading them now is both convalescent and critically galvanizing, offering dreamy holiday-tinged nostalgia with one hand while also raising urgent questions about good and evil in our perilous present. And as it turns out, the titular novel and the other four books in the sequence are also spot-on selections for this winter in particular, the Winter of Dystopia 2017 CE.
Frigid, familiar, spooky - it was a spot-on choice for a holiday read that wasn’t “merry” at all. I read The Dark is Rising years ago, and although its plot details had faded, I remembered its cataclysmic snowstorm, among other wintery elements. The right book always seems to find me, and did so again earlier this month, when I learned through Twitter of a virtual book club, #TheDarkIsReading, dedicated to Susan Cooper’s beloved novel, The Dark Is Rising. For me, reading about winter thus became an essential and compulsory corrective to the still-green outdoors as the holidays approached. When you grow up in Florida, like I did, weirdness is plentiful but winter is scarce. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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