Why This Present Darkness Changed Christian Fiction

We break down why Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness became a phenomenon and why it still gets talked about decades later. We weigh the book’s thriller engine against its dated edges and ask what its spiritual warfare framework does to readers over time. 

• the unlikely publication story and how word of mouth made the book explode 
• why the opening is slow and why the structure eventually turns pages fast 
• functional prose, uneven dialogue, and surprisingly strong spiritual action scenes 
• thin human villains, more compelling demonic antagonists, and what that reveals 
• Marshall Hogan’s evidence-based conversion arc and why it feels earned 
• the Universal Consciousness Society as an organized threat with real stakes 
• how the novel reshaped Christian fiction and influenced evangelical culture 
• the double-edged legacy of “strategic level spiritual warfare” thinking 
• criticisms about demonic agency and the book’s counterclaim about prayer 
• community prayer versus individual prayer and why the turning points are shared 
• the convergence of plot threads, the climax payoff, and an ending that may be too clean 

If you enjoyed this episode and there's a book you want to see reviewed on a future show, we want to hear from you. Send us an email at graceandgrindnyc at gmail.com and tell us what you're reading and why you think it deserves a seat at this table. Everything we are doing you can find at thecompass collective.nyc. Come find us there.

Transcript

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This is Sips and Scripts. I'm Javier. And today we are talking about This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti. Peretti finished this book in 1983 and spent three years getting rejected before Crossway Books finally published it in 1986. Fourteen publishers passed on it before one said yes. Sales started slow, and then Amy Grant mentioned it publicly, and the thing took off. It stayed on the Christian Booksellers Association, the bestseller list for over 150 consecutive weeks. Christianity Today eventually put it on their list of the top 50 books that have shaped evangelicals. More than 10 million copies in print. The story is set in a small college

Book Setup And Publishing History

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town called Ashton. A pastor named Hank Boucher has just taken over a struggling church that doesn't want him there. A newspaper editor named Marshall Hogan starts digging into a story connected to the local college and can't let it go. And underneath all of it, invisible to everyone in the story but visible to the reader, there is a war happening between angels and demons for control of the town. Today we are getting into what this book actually does, how it holds up, and what's worth paying attention to. This is Sips and Scripts. I'm Javier, and today we are talking about This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti. Peretti finished this book in 1983 and spent three years getting rejected before Crossway Books finally published it in 1986. 14 publishers passed on it before one said yes. Sales started slow, and then Amy Grant mentioned it publicly, and the thing took off. It stayed on the Christian Booksellers Association bestseller list for over 150 consecutive weeks. Christianity Today eventually put it on their list of the top 50 books that have shaped evangelicals. More than 10 million copies in print. The story is set in a small college town called Ashton. A pastor named Hank Boucher has just taken over a struggling church that doesn't want him there. A newspaper editor named Marshall Hogan starts digging into a story connected to the local college and can't let it go. And underneath all of it, invisible to everyone in the story but visible to the reader, there is a war happening between angels and demons for control of the town. Today we are getting into what this book actually does, how it holds up, and what's worth paying attention to. Something worth talking about that doesn't come up as much in discussions of this book is the pacing, because it's uneven in ways that are worth being honest about. The early chapters are slow. Peretti is doing a lot of setup work, introducing Ashton, introducing the characters, building the spiritual geography of the town, and if you came to this book cold without anyone telling you to stick with it, the first 50 pages might test your patience. It's not boring exactly, but it's dense with information, and the story takes a while to find its rhythm. Once it does, though, it moves. The structure of cutting between the human story and the spiritual side creates a momentum that compounds as you go. Each time Paretti cuts away, you want to get back to the other

Slow Start Then Momentum Hits

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thread, and that pull in two directions keeps the pages turning. By the back third of the book, the pace has picked up enough that most readers are not putting it down. The slow start is probably one of the reasons the book spread as much through personal recommendation as it did. Having someone tell you to stick with it makes a difference, then the payoff is strong enough that people wanted to pass that recommendation along. The prose itself is functional. Peretti is not a stylist. He is not the kind of writer where you stop on a sentence because of the way it's constructed. His sentences are built to move the story forward, and that is mostly what they do. The dialogue is the weakest element technically. Characters sometimes say things that feel like they are delivering information rather than having an actual conversation. There are moments where exposition is dressed up as dialogue and it shows. That is a common problem in plot-heavy genre fiction, and it shows up in this book more than once. When it happens, it slows things down in a way that the book can't always afford. Where the writing does work well is in the action sequences on the spiritual side. The angelic combat scenes have a physical weight to them that Peretti pulls off by being very specific about what is happening. He is not vague about the spiritual realm. He describes it with the same level of detail he uses for the human world, and that commitment to specificity is what makes those scenes land. When Tal and his warriors engage the demonic forces, there is actual choreography to it, actual stakes, actual cost. Those sequences are some of the most technically accomplished writing in the book. If you want to see Peretti at his best, that's where to look. The female characters are a legitimate weakness, and it's worth naming directly. Sandy Hogan has the most complete arc of any woman in the book, and even her story is largely defined by her relationship to the men around her. Bernice Kruiger, Marshall's reporter, starts the book with a strong entrance. She's the one who kicks the whole thing off by accidentally photographing that meeting and then spends much of the middle section in reactive mode. The women in Hank Buschea's congregation are mostly background. This is partly a reflection of the era and the genre conventions of Christian fiction in the mid-80s, but it is a real limitation of the book and readers coming to it now will notice it. The human antagonists are also less developed

What Works And What Doesn’t

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than the demonic ones, which is an interesting inversion. Langstrat and Cassef are effective as plot functions, but they don't have the texture that Rafar and even Lucius have. You understand what Rafar wants and why he believes he's gonna get it. You understand the internal logic of his contempt for Tal. With Cassef, you mostly understand that he's wealthy and connected and dangerous, which is enough for the story but not enough to make him interesting as a character. The book would be stronger if even one of the human villains had a more complicated interiority. He starts as a skeptic who follows evidence and ends up somewhere he could not have anticipated when the story began, and Peretti earns that shift by making the evidence accumulate in ways that are specific rather than vague. Marshall doesn't convert because he has a spiritual experience. He converts because he has watched enough things happen that he can't explain any other way. That's a more convincing arc than a lot of faith conversion stories in Christian fiction, which tend to lean on the emotional experience rather than the accumulation of evidence. It works largely because Peretti doesn't rush it. The book also gets credit for its villain infrastructure being genuinely organized. The Universal Consciousness Society is not just a collection of bad people doing bad things. It has a hierarchy, it has a plan with stages, it has resources and timelines. That organizational structure makes the threat feel real in a way that a more loosely defined evil usually doesn't. When Paretti shows you the operation from the inside through the demonic side watching it execute, you understand exactly what's being attempted and why it's working. What the book doesn't do as well is give the New Age characters any path toward redemption or complexity. They are largely written as people who are beyond reach, which undercuts some of the emotional range the story might have had. Sandy Hogan is the exception, but her story is resolved in a way that keeps her mostly passive. The people who are fully in the operation stay in the operation right up until they don't, and when things change for them, it tends to happen quickly, rather than through any kind of gradual reckoning. That's a missed opportunity given how much time the book actually spends inside their world, and it's one of the places where the story's ambitions outrun its execution. The legacy of this book is worth taking seriously because it changed what Christian fiction was allowed to be. Before this present darkness, the Christian fiction market was dominated by romance and inspirational stories that stayed well inside safe, predictable territory. Toretti came in with something that was genuinely tense, that had real antagonists, that was willing to put its characters in actual danger and let the spiritual stakes feel like they mattered. Jerry B. Jenkins, who went on to co-write the Left Behind series, credited Peretti specifically with kicking open the doors for Christian novelists. That's a significant acknowledgement from someone who went on to sell 80 million books. Christianity Today put this present darkness on

Legacy And The Spiritual Warfare Boom

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their list of the top 50 books that have shaped evangelicals, which tells you something about the reach it had beyond just the Christian fiction audience. People who don't typically read novels read this one. People who don't think of themselves as fiction readers got through it because the story was moving fast enough to hold them. That kind of crossover appeal is hard to manufacture, and Peretti didn't really have a formula for it. He wrote the book he wanted to write, and it turned out to resonate far beyond the audience he probably expected to reach. The spiritual warfare movement that the book both reflected and helped accelerate in the 80s and 90s is worth understanding as a context. There was a growing interest in charismatic and Pentecostal circles, in what was called strategic level spiritual warfare, the idea that demonic forces are assigned to specific geographic regions, and that prayer and spiritual authority can directly displace them. Peretti was not writing theology, but his novel gave that framework a narrative shape that made it feel tangible. Pastors used it in sermons. Prayer groups referenced it. It became a kind of shared imaginative vocabulary for a very significant portion of the evangelical world. Peretti didn't set out to build a theological framework. He set out to write a story, and the theological framework was something people built around it after the fact that influence is a double-edged thing. On one side, the book got a lot of people thinking seriously about prayer in a way that felt urgent rather than routine. On the other side, some of the patterns in the book, the organized conspiracy, the hidden network of connected people working an agenda, the idea that opposition to the church is always strategically coordinated. Those patterns have been noted by scholars as feeding into modes of thinking that don't always end in healthy places. When you train yourself to see organized spiritual conspiracy behind ordinary events, it's a framework that can be applied in ways Peretti probably never intended. That's not a critique of the book's theology exactly. It's more about how a framework can spread beyond the context it was built for. Book is a novel. It has a specific beginning, middle, and end. The spiritual conspiracy in Ashton gets resolved, but the interpretive habit the book encourages, looking for coordinated spiritual opposition behind the friction of everyday life, doesn't come with those guardrails when it moves into the real world. That's worth sitting with when you think about what the book actually did to its readers versus what Peretti was trying to do. On a purely theological level, the book drew some criticism at the time for how much agency it gives to the demonic forces. The concern from some theologians was that the portrayal of demons as this organized, effective, nearly omnipresent force risked inflating their status beyond what scripture actually supports. Peretti's demons are not all powerful, but they are very capable, very organized, and in control of the situation in Ashton for most of the novel. Some readers came away with an elevated sense of demonic threat that felt out of proportion to what they had understood before. That reaction is worth taking seriously as an honest data point about how the book lands for certain readers. The counter to that critique is that the book is also very explicit about

Demons, Agency, And The Prayer Question

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what undoz all of that demonic effectiveness, which is prayer. The demons in Ashton are formidable, but they are not unbeatable, and Peretti is clear about the conditions under which they lose ground. So the elevated sense of threat is paired with an equally elevated sense of what prayer can do, and that pairing was probably the intended effect all along. The sequel, Piercing the Darkness, came out in 1988 and follows a similar structure in a different setting. It's a competent book and it has its admirers, but it doesn't have the same cultural footprint as the original. Partly that's because this present darkness was the first, and it carried all the surprise of something genuinely new in the genre. Partly it's because Peretti was working with a framework that had already been established, and the second book didn't have to do the heavy lifting of building the world from scratch, which meant it also didn't carry the same sense of discovery. Whether the original book holds up today depends a lot on what you're bringing to it. If you're reading it as a product of its time, a novel that emerged from a specific cultural and theological moment in American evangelicalism, it holds up as a document of that moment very well. If you're reading it as a straightforward thriller, the slow start and the thin characterization of the villains will probably be more noticeable now than they were when the book was new. And if you're reading it for what it was trying to say about prayer and the unseen realm, that argument is still there and it still has force, even if the packaging feels dated in places. The core of what Peretti built here is durable even where the surface shows its age, and that's not something you can say about most books from that era of Christian fiction. The biblical grounding of this book is something that probably gets underappreciated when people talk about it mostly as a thriller or a spiritual warfare story. Peretti was writing from Ephesians 6.12, the passage about wrestling not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and spiritual forces in the heavenly realms. That's not just an inspiration credit, it's the structural argument the entire novel is built on. The book is an extended imaginative exercise in what that passage might actually look like if you could see it playing out in a specific place at a specific time. That anchoring gives the book a stability that a lot of spiritual fiction doesn't have. Peretti isn't inventing a cosmology. He's taking a biblical framework and asking what it would look like dramatized at the level of a small town. The names, the hierarchy, the specific mechanics of how prayer functions in the spiritual realm, those are his imaginative editions. But the underlying claim that there is a war happening in an unseen realm that intersects with the visible world is something he's drawing directly from Paul. That's worth understanding because it keeps the book from feeling like it came out of nowhere theologically, even when the details are entirely Paretti's own. One thing the book does that doesn't get talked about enough is its treatment of community prayer versus individual prayer. Hank Bush Shea praying alone has some effect, but the real turning points in the spiritual realm happen when more people are praying together. Edith Duster is significant, not just because she's a dedicated intercessor, but because she becomes a connection point that draws other people into the effort. When the prayer covering over Ashton begins to expand, it's not because Hank got more intense individually, it's because more people joined in and the community started functioning as a praying unit rather than a collection of individuals going through separate motions. That's a more nuanced argument than the book usually gets credit

Community Prayer And Rising Pressure

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for. It's not just saying prayer works, it's saying prayer works differently at a community level than at an individual level, and that the spiritual health of the praying community is itself a variable. The demonic strategy targets the church specifically because a fragmented, distracted, constantly arguing congregation doesn't pray together with any real consistency. The book makes that argument through story rather than assertion, which is harder to do and more effective when it lands. The midsection of the book is where Peretti does his best sustained work in terms of building pressure. The human plot on Marshall's side keeps running into walls. Every time he gets close to something, the book shows you on the spiritual side exactly why that door is getting closed. The Clarion is struggling financially and Marshall is already operating without much financial runway. Brummel keeps engineering situations that keep him off balance. Sandy's involvement with Langstrat deepens in ways Marshall can feel but can't pin down, and that personal dimension makes the larger threat feel more urgent. And on Hank Bush's side, the church conflict keeps escalating, the congregation is fracturing, and the pressure on him to leave becomes more organized and harder to resist. Toretti keeps these two pressure tracks building simultaneously, and what that produces in the middle of the book is a genuine sense that things are getting worse in ways the protagonists can't stop. That's good thriller construction regardless of the genre. You need your characters to be losing ground for long enough that the reader starts to worry, and Peretti manages that in the midsection, better than some of his other craft choices would suggest he could. The pressure feels earned because he's been building it methodically since the first chapter. Edith Duster is worth spending more time on than most reviews of this book give her. She's an older woman, a former missionary, someone who has been praying in relative obscurity for a long time. She's not glamorous, she's not powerful in any conventional sense, she's easy to underestimate within the story itself, but she's one of the most spiritually effective characters in the book, and Peretti gives her that status without making her a symbol or a type. She feels like a very specific person, and her scenes carry weight because of that specificity. Minor characters in genre thriller fiction usually exist to deliver information or get into trouble. Edith does neither. She just prays. And in the world of this novel, that turns out to matter more than anything else anyone is doing. The book's attention to ordinary people like Edith is one of the things that separates it from more sensationalized versions of the spiritual warfare story. The people who actually move things in Ashton are not the ones with obvious authority or visibility. They're the ones who pray. That's a deliberate choice on Peretti's part, and it's consistent with the Ephesians 6 framework he's working from. It also makes the story feel more accessible because the spiritual agency in this book is not reserved for people with special credentials. Hank Buschet is young and struggling. Edith is elderly and overlooked. These are not impressive people by any external measure, and that's precisely the point. Peretti's argument is that spiritual effectiveness is not a function of status or visibility. It's a function of prayer, and prayer is available to anyone willing to do it. The tension in the middle section also works because Peretti keeps the demonic forces feeling competent throughout. They're not making mistakes, they're executing their plan well. The only thing that disrupts them is prayer, which is exactly what the book is arguing. That tight consistency between the theology and the plotting is what gives the midbook its particular kind of dread. Things are going according to plan for the wrong side, and the reader can see it clearly happening while the human characters go about their lives not knowing what's closing in around them. Back third of this book is where everything the previous sections have been building starts to converge, and Peretti handles that convergence better than most thriller writers manage when they're running parallel storylines. The two threads, Marshall's investigation and Hank Busch's struggle to hold the church together, start pulling toward the same point. The connections that have been obscured throughout the novel start becoming visible on the human side at roughly the same time that the spiritual conflict is reaching its peak. That timing is not accidental. Peretti has been engineering it from the beginning, and when it arrives, it feels like resolution rather than coincidence. The climactic confrontation between Tal and Rafar is the spiritual

Convergence, Climax, And Clean Wrap-Up

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centerpiece of the ending and it delivers. The whole novel has been building toward a moment where the prayer covering over Ashton is strong enough for Tal to actually engage Rafar directly, and when that moment comes, Peretti makes it feel genuinely earned. He's established the power differential clearly enough earlier in the book that the reader understands what it takes for the balance to shift. Rafar is not defeated because Tal is suddenly stronger than he was. He's defeated because the conditions on the human side have changed enough that Tal can now operate with the backing he's been missing for most of the story. The spiritual outcome follows from the human choices, which is the argument the book has been making all along. That cause and effect relationship is the cleanest expression of the book's central argument. The spiritual outcome is a direct function of what the human characters have or haven't been doing in prayer. Peretti traces that line all the way to the end and keeps it consistent. Nothing in the climax happens because of luck or because the story needed to wrap up. It happens because of prayer, which is what the book said it would be from the beginning. Peretti committed to the system and paid it off on its own terms. That consistency is one of the things the novel gets most right. Marshall's art reaches its resolution in the final section as well. By this point, he has seen enough that skepticism is no longer a sustainable position for him, and Peretti handles the transition carefully. It's not a dramatic conversion scene in the conventional sense. It's more like someone arriving at a conclusion they've been approaching for a long time and finally being willing to name it. Given how the character has been established and written throughout the novel, at low-key arrival feels right. Marshall is not the kind of person who would have a loud emotional breakthrough and Peretti doesn't try to give him one. The restraint in how that moment is written is one of the better craft decisions in the final section. Sandy Hogan's story also resolves in the final section. Her arc has been the most vulnerable human thread in the novel because it involves someone who is genuinely in over her head and doesn't fully understand what she's gotten into. The resolution of her storyline is handled with more care than some of the other plot threads. Peretti doesn't use her as a cautionary tale exactly, but her experience in the Universal Consciousness Society and what it costs her is allowed to have real weight. It doesn't get tidied up too neatly, and that restraint is worth noting because it would have been easy to resolve her story in a way that erased what she went through. The church conflict resolution is also worth noting. The faction that's been trying to remove Hank Boucher throughout the novel doesn't just disappear because the spiritual war resolves. The human damage that conflict has caused is treated as real. Some relationships in the congregation don't fully recover. Some people leave. Charretti is not naive about what congregational conflict does to a community, even when the larger spiritual situation improves, and giving that its due rather than wrapping it in an easy reconciliation is one of the more honest choices the book makes in its final chapters. One criticism that's fair to raise about the ending is that it does resolve rather completely. Everything that needs to come together does. Every character thread lands where it's supposed to land. That level of resolution can feel slightly too clean for a book that spent most of its length, making the situation feel genuinely dire. Not every loose end needs to survive an ending, but when a story wraps up this completely, it can take some of the weight out of the final pages in retrospect. You realize the book was always going to land where it lands, which is not the same as feeling like it couldn't have gone the other way. The book's final pages are noticeably quiet compared to the climax. Charredi brings the story down from the big confrontation and settles into something smaller and more personal. That's the right instinct. After everything the characters have been through, ending on a large note would feel wrong. The quiet ending is consistent with how the book began in an ordinary place where extraordinary things were happening without anyone noticing, and closing back to that register is a deliberate callback that works. Overall, the ending earns most of what the novel has been building toward. There are places where it resolves too cleanly, and places where individual character moments feel slightly rushed, but the core payoff, the spiritual and human threads converging at the same moment, delivers on the book's central promise. Whether you find that satisfying probably depends on how much of the journey you bought into along the way. If the system worked for you through the middle of the book, the ending pays it off. If it didn't, the ending confirms what you already suspected. That split reader reaction is probably inevitable for a book built on as specific a set of theological premises as this one is. Alright, this has been my review of This Present Darkness by Frank Retty. I hope you got something out of it whether you've read the book before or this is your first time hearing about it. If you enjoyed this episode and there's a book you want to see reviewed on a future show, we want to hear from you. Send us an email at graceandgrindnyc at gmail.com and tell us what you're reading and why you think it deserves a seat at this table. Everything we are doing you can find at thecompass collective.nyc. Come find us there. I'm Javier, and this has been Sips and Scripts. Until next time, God bless.