It is only in the Dark Is Rising that this prophecy element is implemented and shared. The prophecy is absent in the first book, and the Drew children see their story merely as a hair-raising adventure. Then I spent the next six years writing these four books.”

And I wrote the last page of the last book so I knew where I was going. And the people who were going to be in these five books. About a boy who wakes up on his 11th birthday and finds he can work magic… My head went into overdrive, and I took out a piece of paper and wrote down five titles, starting with Over Sea, and five times of the year – the Celtic festival times like Beltane and Samhain, and the solstices. “I just suddenly thought, ‘I want to write a book set in this kind of snow but in England. As Cooper related to The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins in the interview, ‘A Life in Writing,’

Will’s origins like those of the Pevensies, the Hobbits and a certain boy wizard began in the most innocuous way. Tolkien taught there, and her work has been described as a bridge between their era and the young-adult fantasy epics of more recent decades.” No, it’s not Harry Potter-it’s Will Stanton, who discovers that he is an Old One, an immortal being with a special role in the timeless struggle between Light and Dark. “It’s a plot that might sound familiar: On his 11th birthday, a boy learns about his supernatural abilities and the existence of magic right under our human noses, and then has to search for a series of powerful objects in order to save the world. In fact, for longtime fans of the fantasy genre, the hero of The Dark Is Rising, Will Stanton, has more than earned a place in the pantheon beside the likes of Lucy Pevensie and Bilbo Baggins who came before him, and the students at Hogwarts and the demigods of Percy Jackson who would follow.

Unknown to many of them the original source material predated the Boy Who Lived by at least two decades, and despite superficial similarities in the central protagonist arc, they couldn’t be any more different. The film was rightly panned, both by critics and fans of the original novel The Dark is Rising for a number of reasons, while casual fantasy fans dismissed it as a generic Harry Potter knock off. Naturally with the success of the Harry Potter franchise both as a book and a film, studios rushed to try to crank out the next series just like it, leading to lackluster adaptations of young adult fantasy novels such as The Golden Compass, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, and a forgotten film known as The Seeker: The Dark is Rising. Every major franchise geared towards Young Adults seems to dabble in this aspect of the heroic monomyth, including Star Wars, Spider-Man, Harry Potter, and The Matrix. Nowadays the “Chosen One” narrative has become something of a literary cliché.

The dark is rising order