This is not a reference to the terrible adaptation of the wonderful book of the same name by Susan Cooper.
The film was released in 2007 and is called The Seeker: The Dark is Rising.
It has awful dialogue and loses all the dread of the original book. The book has been a favourite of mine for decades and is set around the Christmas period. A few years ago Robert MacFarlane led a readalong in real time, and has now produced a radio adaptation.
The book's themes still have a lot of resonance.
The book is set in Buckinghamshire, where Cooper grew up – but the later novels take us to the Welsh mountain of Cadair Idris and the lake of Tal-y-llyn, as well as the Cornish village of Mevagissey (here called Trewissick). Ancient wisdom is encoded in precise histories of these local places. Wayland the Smith, the mythic English ideal of a blacksmith, turns up. So does Herne the Hunter, roaming riotously from his traditional home in Windsor. The old names of premodern roads, long erased on Ordnance Survey maps, reveal their true purpose and the nature of the immortals who walk them.
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