Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan CooperScholastic, 1989 (originally Macmillan, 1965)

I read this book (and the rest of Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence) as a child, but I didn’t remember anything about the plot: not the English-ness of them, not the Arthurian context, nothing, in fact, aside from a few lines of poetry from one of the later books. Re-reading Over Sea, Under Stone, I was most struck by the sense of good and evil as opposing forces, as real things in the world. (I think that this is the case in books like A Wrinkle in Time, too.) Cooper has one character point out that the struggle between good and evil is a neverending one, “for there is something of each in every man,” but it is clear that good and evil are separate from people as well as part of them. (Contrast this to, say, the Harry Potter books—there’s certainly a sense of destiny in those, and the Harry/Voldemort pairing is certainly one of good vs. evil, and it’s echoed in The Order of the Phoenix vs. the Death Eaters, but I read it much more as a more human-centered struggle, of good people vs. evil people, or people whose ideas and ideals are good vs. people whose ideas and ideals are evil. [I use “human” in a broad sense here, given that in the HP books there are non-human creatures that are allied with each side.] Even Harry’s powers against Voldemort are speculated to be linked to the fact that his mother loved him so much, and that this gave him protection—which is again, a human-centered thing.) Okay, so the Harry Potter books are secular, while Cooper’s aren’t so much, but I think the difference, the palpable sense of Evil in this book, makes it much scarier than any of JK Rowlings’s books thus far, page-turning and compelling and often ominous.