Piercing the Darkness.

MR. PERETTI'S angels have swords; his demons breathe sulphur: their corporeality may be visible only through the eyes of the soul, but they are corporeal nonetheless. The angels attack under cover of prayer, as we have been taught, and the demons possess those who invite them in, but are vanquished by the name of Jesus, as we have also been taught. The Heavenly Host and the Host of Hell are both winged, the demons appropriately scaly. Both angels and demons fly through the sky and swoop down on our earthly towns. The demons may succeed for a while, but the angels triumph everlastingly.

Mr. Peretti's publisher acclaims him the successor to C. S. Lewis; the Darkness novels have sold in the millions. Yet the author's name is virtually unknown outside the Christian community ("Christian" in a restrictive rather than a catholic sense). What is Frank Peretti's place in the world of fiction, and why is he such a hit?

The novels are celebrations of the power of the prayer and Watchcare" that support the Host of Heaven and protect the people of God. No doubt this welcome message helps explain Mr. Peretti's popularity. One can imagine Christians turning to prayer -serious hardworking prayer-after, or indeed while, reading these books.

The villains in This Present Darkness-or rather, the human villains, for the Legions of Hell are thickly gathered about us-are the members of the Universal Consciousness Society. In Piercing the Darkness, the evildoers are members of the Summit Institute, which I take to be modeled on the Summit University of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, but even if not, in both books Hell's allies wear the clothes of the New Age Movement.

In the first, the efforts of the Legions of Hell are concentrated against Pastor Hank Busche of the Ashton Community Church; in the second, against the Good Shepherd Christian School, in Bacon's Comer, not far from Ashton. The plots involve trumped-up charges of all kinds, including sexual abuse and incest (against a crusading journalist, Marshall Hogan), child abuse (against the head of a Christian school), rape (against the pastor), and drug-dealing (against an honest cop and a teenager who might otherwise testify against the demon-possessed New Agers). Prayer by the Saving Remnant and intercession by the Host of Heaven rescue our heroes and heroines in the nick of time.

Hank Busche and Marshall Hogan (as well as Hogan's wife, Kate, and his sidekick, Bernice Krueger) appear in both books. So do the good angels Tal and Guilo, and Rafar, Prince of Babylon, and the Strongman, both of the Hosts of Hell. The scene in the first book is largely Ashton, the home of Whitmore College, which is to be sold to the Universal Consciousness Society through the combined machinations of a Satanist professor, the multinational Omega Corporation, the crooked local chief of police, and the New Age minister of the Ashton United Christian Church.

In the sequel the scenes shift from Bacon's Corner to Bentmore University, and from the Summit Institute to the Omega Center, publisher of Finding the Real Me, a Satanist/New Age fourth-grade curriculum; the novel even brings us to Washington, D.C., and the headquarters of the FBI, which is literally on the side of the angels. (Mr. Peretti has, perhaps, rather too high a regard for agencies of the U.S. Government.)

It is interesting (and may show the influence of C. S. Lewis) that the angels have earthly nationalities, including one who is apparently Samoan. None of them comes from realms untouched by Protestant evangelism. It is also interesting that, at the end of This Present Darkness, the angels take off (literally) for Brazil, a country with a particular attraction to evangelicals ever since the death there of the missionary pilot and Christian martyr Nate Saint.

Is it wrong to carp about the lack of personality in the angels, or about the lack of character development among Mr. Peretti's people? Nationality is as close to personality as the angels get, and the humans are mostly either committed Christians or committed Antichristians, which (in the second case at least) makes character development irrelevant if not impossible: if you have surrendered your character, how is it to be developed? Nor does the story make up for dull characters. Mr. Peretti's plots are like The Perils of Pauline-a series of episodes.

The combination of unrealized characters and cliff-hanging story-lines does not make for very interesting reading. One part of the problem was noted many years before Mr. Peretti was born by Dorothy L. Sayers: damnation is the only Christian tragedy, yet the committed Christian cannot be damned. An accumulation of dramatic incidents in this context will produce not drama (and certainly not tragedy), but melodrama.

Still, Mr. Peretti deserves his sales, and many readers will get exactly what they want from his books. These novels were very popular this past year on the campus of Messiah College, for example, and it is not difficult to see why. There is in the Christian community an appetite for stories that take the Bible literally: angels, demons, and all.

Mr. Peretti's novels can be shared by the entire family-the Christian family, that is. The books are sold mostly in Christian bookstores to believers, and this makes one thing quite clear. Whatever their genre may be, it is not fantasy." In the minds of the author and his readership, these Powers and Principalities are altogether real, as real as the powers of prayer and watchcare."

Neither is Mr. Peretti writing allegory, although the novels may descend, through many roundabouts, from Bunyan. In fact these are hereand-now adult Sunday-School stories, happy endings guaranteed. We are none the worse for happy endings, of course, and it would be hard to argue that we are any the worse for victories of the Host of Heaven and the Saints of God, however melodramatic. Perhaps we should just enjoy Mr. Peretti's novels in the way we once enjoyed radio serials such as Jack Armstrong, Sky King, and The Shadow. We might even call Mr. Peretti's novels The Adventures of the Sky Kings. Happy landings.