I read Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness and the sequel Piercing the Darkness as part of my high school Bible class in the 80s. I’m sure we talked about them in class at some point, but I don’t remember anything any of us may have said. I’m sure we thought it was a good depiction of spiritual warfare.

This Present Darkness is one of the five novels Daniel Silliman uses to analyze Christian imagination in his book Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith. The others are Love Comes Softly, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack.

In her review, Gina Dalfonzo sums up the book with this question, “Ever wonder about the enduring popularity of Amish fiction, or how The Shack grabbed an audience that once went for much more theologically conservative books?”

“He traces an ideological line through these books that helps us understand how the evangelical community got to where it is, spiritually, ideologically, and politically.”

Someone should have written a parody of The Shack, like The Shed. Just make it funny, theologically sound, and feature a conversation in a shed and you can do anything else you want with it. Left Behind had a few parodies written, one of which we reviewed here, Re:raptured.