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Did anybody else grow reading—and re-reading—Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness?

Ever since my college experience changed (for better or worse) my ideas about what is and isn’t Great Literature, I have looked back at my teenage obsession with Peretti’s novels of spiritual warfare with a mixture of mild embarrassment and nostalgia. The characters and stories aren’t timeless (I can’t remember any of the details of those novels these many years later) and there’s undoubtedly much to take issue with in the theological and spiritual aspects of the tales. But while reading them I felt a vague sense that I was experiencing something new and interesting in Christian fiction.

At least one other person feels the same way. Take a look at In Defense of Frank Peretti by Joi Weaver at the Evangelical Outpost blog:

The criticisms of Peretti have quite a range: to some people he’s too overtly Christian, to others he focuses too much on the occult. For some the characterization of the people in his novels in the problem, and others find his plots too cliché. His books almost always include a dramatic conversion, angelic warfare, and New Age rituals that turn out to be Satanic in origin.

Though they might not rise to the heights of literature one hopes to see from Evangelical fiction, Peretti’s early books did something very important: they opened a door. With the popularity of This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness, up and coming authors were more free to branch out, to explore, to use other genres of fiction. In any Evangelical fiction catalog, one can now find detective fiction (The Danielle Ross series), comedy (The Wally McDoogle books), adventure stories (The Heirs of Cahira O’Connor series), and many more. It is even arguable that Peretti’s ground-breaking stories allowed Christians to be more engaged with the Harry Potter, Golden Compass, and Twilight series. Such books are no longer “off-limits,” but open for reading and debate.

I think Weaver’s definitely on to something. For me as a young reader, Peretti’s sometimes-clunky spiritual thrillers helped me see that C.S. Lewis, brilliant though he was, was not the only Christian allowed to blend faith and fantastic fiction. Other Christian writers like Stephen Lawhead and John White helped to push that door even further open.

I think Weaver’s final observation is particularly insightful; it may be that the most important legacy of Peretti and his peers is not the fiction they wrote so much as the way they encouraged Christians to approach the genres of fantasy and science fiction with a mind toward their spiritual aspects.

What about you? Did you, like me, spend many a childhood evening with your nose buried in a Peretti novel? What other authors might you add to the above list? And do you think these Christian fantasists have had a positive impact on Christianity’s relationship to literature?

Has a work of fiction ever helped you to better understand a difficult story or ambiguous character in the Bible?

A great deal of fiction—Christian or otherwise—draws on characters and themes from the Bible. When we encounter a fictional character who’s been inspired by a Biblical one (Superman, for example), we can often gain extra insight into that fictional character by studying the Biblical character that inspired him.

But have you ever experienced the opposite—a situation where a fictional character or story element helped illuminate a Biblical character or event?

The First Things blog has an interesting post that explores what we can learn about Job by studying the fictional character Faust. The close parallels (and key differences) between Job and Faust provide us with a new angle from which to understand Job.

I’ve experienced this on occasion, most recently while re-reading Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. The main character is a priest and (highly flawed) Christ-figure of sorts. In the course of the novel, he interacts with and even helps a person who he strongly suspects will eventually betray him to his enemies… but he helps the man anyway, knowingly putting himself in danger. The priest’s thought process is complex, and he isn’t a perfect picture of Christ by any means, but the exploration of his attitude toward his would-be betrayer has influenced the way I read the interaction between Jesus and Judas. The Bible doesn’t tell us what Jesus thought and felt as he ministered to the man who would betray him to death, and so the insight from Greene’s novel provides some ways to ponder that question.

What about you? What fictional characters or stories have shaped the way you view certain people or stories in the Bible?