Ep 175 - The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper

News at 11! The Dark is Rising! We repeat: the Dark IS Rising! The second (and titular) entry in Susan Cooper's award-winning The Dark Is Rising sequence turns out to have been a perfect book for Children's Book Week. It's a young adult fantasy novel about a boy named Will Stanton who embarks on an epic quest to fight against the Dark with the powers of the Light. It leads us to ask, why do kids gravitate towards stories with black-and-white morals? And why do people keep entrusting the fate of the universe to tweens? Of course, we also find time to talk terrible movie adaptations, time tourists, Old Old things, and the trials of having holiday-adjacent birthdays.