This Present Darkness

This Present Darkness, by Frank Peretti, celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. With this book (and its success), Peretti paved the way for other Christian adventure/suspense fiction writing, including Ted Dekker and the Left Behind folks.  Thankfully, Peretti shares more in common with the former than the latter.

This Present Darkness takes place in the small town of Ashton. Demonic activity has slowly been increasing and spreading in influence, unbeknownst to most people in the town. Newcomers Marshall Hogan, newspaper editor, and Hank Busche, pastor, discover quickly that not all is as it seems. They quickly find themselves in direct opposition of these evil forces and must find some solution before their lives are destroyed. The people who preceded them in their respective positions were run out of town - as well as many other prominent town figures. Hogan is joined by his assistant Bernice Kreuger in a full-fledged newspaper investigation into shady characters. Before long, they are in well over their heads with little hope of success. Busche wants to launch a prayer attack, but how successful can he be when half of his congregation wants him out of the picture? Angels stand ready and armed to battle the demons, but will they have enough prayerful supporters to overcome the growing strength of Ashton's resident demons?

As you might guess, there is plenty of adventure and excitement in this book. It's certainly a page-turner for most of the book, and it has a nice pacing. It still suffers some of the same problems that many popular fiction books do - the characters are under-developed (but not as bad as in the Left Behind series) and the dialogue leaves much to be desired. From a literary standpoint, Peretti is pretty average. The plot is well-developed and complex, though, and flows well from page to page. It maintains a pretty high level of intensity, although the final battle was not quite as intense as I had hoped.

From a theological standpoint, I had few issues, although I know many people take issue with the supernatural angel vs. demon stuff. I believe that spiritual warfare is a real thing that has major implications in the real world, although I don't really see it taking place quite the same way Peretti does. That didn't pose any issues for me, though. Peretti is also definitely fundamentalist, but again, with only two exceptions it wasn't a problem. He went out of his way to label a demon-influenced pastor as being a big animal rights advocate, but it wasn't overdone, so I was able to ignore that jab. Peretti also has an extremely poor view of the field of Psychology, basically equating it with psychic activity and astrology. Again, it wasn't overdone - just mentioned a couple of times - and it mainly focused on a truly nutso professor, so I was able to look past that.

Overall, I found this book fun to read and at least competently written. I will soon read the sequel and I'm kind of looking forward to it. This is a pretty good entry into the rather bleak field of Christian fiction.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

45 books, 155 days, still well on pace.