The Dark Is Rising Themes

It's ultimate showdown time. At its heart, The Dark is Rising is really just another telling of the age-old tale about what happens when good and evil go head-to-head. In fact, the whole book can b...

Ever wished you could travel through time? We totally have. For Will, though, this fantasy becomes reality when he learns that he's an Old One. His time-travel isn't exactly what we might have imag...

There's nothing worse than when you can't understand what someone is trying to say to you—just ask Charlie Brown. It turns out it's tough to communicate with people when you don't speak the same...

It's an age-old question: Do we decide what happens in our lives, or does some cosmic force (a.k.a. fate) control us? In The Dark is Rising, Will gets to choose what to do with his newfound powers....

We think Uncle Ben said it best: "With great power comes great responsibility." In The Dark is Rising, Will knows this better than anybody because he's still learning how to use his magical abiliti...

In The Dark is Rising, coming of age isn't just about going through puberty and having to take the SAT. No, for Will it's more about saving the world. Complicating things further is the fact that w...

The Dark is Rising is filled with magic and strangeness, but one thing is most definitely super normal about Will's life—his family. He loves these people, though they get on his nerves. But so i...

They say knowledge is power, and that's perfectly true in The Dark is Rising. There are certain important truths that some characters are privy to and others are not; in general, the Old Ones are i...