Frank Peretti
“We’ve talked about God, we’ve toyed with the idea of angels; now let’s try evil angels, evil spirit entities. To the atheistic scientist, they might appear as extraterrestrials, often with their own spaceships; to evolutionists they might claim to be highly evolved beings; to the lonely, they might appear as long-lost relatives speaking from the other side of the grave; Jungian psychologists consider them “archetypal images” dredged from the collective consciousness of the human race…whatever description or definition fits, whatever shape, whatever form it takes to win a person’s confidence and appeal to his vanity, that’s the form they take.”
This is the only work of fiction (excluding the sequel, “Piercing the Darkness”) that I have yet read that has both soberly challenged me on, and got me excited about, praying for God’s mission and praying against Satan’s plans. For that reason alone it should be given the highest praise. Peretti emphasises the reality of spiritual warfare; This Present Darkness is an exploration of Ephesians 6:12: “for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” He compellingly weaves together an intricate plotline with one foot in the physical and one foot in the spiritual that effectively undoes a lot of unhelpful assumptions we unconsciously make about angels and demons.
The welcome exhortation to pray and the coaxing of the reader into meditating on spiritual warfare outshines a lot of the more mundane problems with the book. Peretti’s writing-style is often clunky. His characters range from occasionally-to-often being one-dimensional. His insistence throughout that demons are chilling entities jars with their execution; they are described as almost laughably gargoyle-like. However, the more solemn objection that Peretti peddles a harmful theology of spiritual mechanics can be batted away. This Present Darkness is so clearly a work of fiction (most of its theological faults are glaring) designed to ensure reflection on Ephesians 6:12 that such objections cannot seriously be entertained. Peretti single-mindedly, and successfully, carries out his purpose to positively change our walk with Jesus through this book. Not much more could be asked of any fictional author.
7/10