Susan Cooper Books

This book was instrumental for me, too – a frankly terrifying story of a boy being pulled into an ancient, mythic battle fought in the land right before us, which we cannot see but whose outcome affects us enormously. The way Cooper summons up the sense of being outside on a winter day is just perfect: special and liberating and sinister and silent all at once. The figure of The Black Rider was a huge inspiration for the character of The Midwinter King in The Midnight Guardians – in the first draft, Col was pursued not by the Lord of all Darkness, but by a sort of bounty hunter figure.