Silver on the Tree

I remember loving these books as a child but I had forgotten how much I skipped over. Re-reading childhood favorites is dangerous, but in the case of the Dark Is Rising books, you really should not do it.

What I loved was the Drew children, because Stone Over Sea is a wonderful book and I kept reading to get more of them. But everything having to do with Will Stanton was so outrageously irritating, I nearly didn't finish the fifth book, Silver on the Tree. Good lord. He magically gets all these outrageous powers with no effort, goes through all this pointless contrived rigamarole, then is a rarefied Old One and crucial to the survival of the world. He's all smug and humble and knows more than everyone. I just could not stand Will Stanton.

First off, I hate it when people get superpowers without any cost. Second, Will is boring. He just is. He doesn't have to fight for anything and he gets all the credit, whereas the Drew kids are way more fun and do much more of the work. Third, his powers are awfully convenient, or inconvenient, and that's just annoying. Every E. Nesbit book is infinitely more careful about powers and rules and costs than these books.

Silver On the Tree was the worst offender, followed closely by The Dark Is Rising, for being full of convoluted and nonsensical challenges and mysterious labyrinths of guesswork. And staring wisely off into the distance while looking grim and sad. Gack. About fifty pages of Silver on the Tree, the part in the Lost Lands, could have been cut out with no discernible loss.

I went back to read these because of my own writing in YA, and I did learn a lot, but I never expected so much of it to be what not to do! I learned a tremendous amount about writing terror in children. Stone Over Sea is completely terrifying, Barney and Jane and Simon constantly in situations far beyond their understanding or capabilities. But that is nearly always human danger, danger from recognizable human sources, even when those are driven by the Dark.

When the danger is oversized and silly, it's impossible to grasp, like the absurd Tethys and the bellowing Greenwitch, who just become bizarre and almost laughable in Greenwitch, after a very promising beginning with an extremely frightening figure made of branches and leaves. Whereas by far the most terrifying thing to me in the whole series was the farmer who shot Bran's beautiful dog. I'm still in shock from that.

So when I write YA with supernatural elements, I want to be sure to keep my evil and my danger located firmly in the human. The supernatural is always a metaphor, somehow, isn't it? The supernatural Dark should stand for the darkness within us, not the other way around.

It doesn't matter to children (possibly not to adults either) whether someone is driven by a supernatural force or just a twist in the brain to do something evil to you. It's not a distinction that makes any sense. It's like trying to explain to a kid that the shot you're getting will make you not get sick later on. It just doesn't mean anything.

That whole area of adult life might even just be rationalization, I'm still not sure about that. When we start talking something away, something bad that someone did, we bring in psychology and a dark past and brain chemistry and he was on drugs and all, but it's all just to say: it wasn't him, it wasn't what a person would do, it was EVIL. It was THE DARK.

Well, take that away and you're left with humans who do terrible things for unfathomable reasons. They just ARE that way. It's a frightening and unpredictable world that children live in and we're always just one failed rationalization away from it. Lose that safe logic and you're into a terrifying land.

I still want to punch Will Stanton in the head and I said out loud about a hundred times while reading Silver on the Tree, "This is a terrible book," oh good golly, all the stupid convoluted tests and secret poems and depressed kings and magical trains and criminy, not to mention the most ridiculous anti-racism blurb ever inserted into a book for no narrative reason whatsoever, plus the worst ending ever, but I learned a lot from these five books and that is very far from nothing.