1. Dishonesty Is The Second-Best Policy and Other Rules to Live By” by David Mitchell
2. “Michael Palin In Venezuela” by Michael Palin
3. “Happiness: Lessons From A New Science” by Richard Layard
4. “The People on Platform 5” by Clare Pooley
5. “Encyclopaedia of  Narrow Gauge Railways of Great Britain and Ireland” by Thomas Middlemiss
6. “Moscow Coup: The Death of the Soviet System” by Martin Sixsmith
7. “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged Thirteen and Three-Quarters” by Sue Townsend
8. “The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole” by Sue Townsend
9. “Adrian Mole: The Collected Poems” by Sue Townsend
10. “How To Live Like A Stoic” by Tom Hodgkinson
11. “The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass aged 37 3/4” by Adrian Plass
12. “This Present Darkness” by Frank Peretti 

Started: 25th February 2026
Finished: 21st March 2026

1/5 stars, because Goodreads won’t let me go lower, but none from a personal perspective.

Joint book review and Reflections post.

I read this book as research for some writing I’m doing about my own experiences as a teenage Christian in the early 90s. This book was well-known and popular in my youth group at the time, and I’m sure I read it back then, although I can’t remember for sure – it may have been the sequel, Piercing The Darkness. I was keen to read it to see how and why it was so influential, and what the book’s key messages are.

My review is going to be very scathing, and I’ll go into detail as to why I’ve rated it so poorly, but if you look at reviews of it on Goodreads and elsewhere, you’ll find it gets loads of 4- and 5-star rave reviews. I think it’s important to explain why this is, because it isn’t purely down to different tastes in books, or that this book is genuinely good and I’m an outlier for thinking it isn’t. It’s deliberately marked up by hardcore Christians who are fully committed to the book’s message, and want people to read it for that reason alone. The TL;DR version of the book’s message is that demonic forces control virtually everything in the world, and that you can only be saved from them by completely uncompromising belief in a very particular form of Christian faith. Everyone else is on a one-way ticket to Hell.

Right, that established, I should point out that when I first read this book, I was a very committed and passionate young Christian. I was about to embark on a year-out programme with a charismatic Christian organisation in the UK that I now consider to be little short of an extremist cult. This group were fully committed to “spiritual warfare” and seeing God move in powerful ways, and at the time I couldn’t get enough. Over thirty years later, I look back on that period of my life with some horror, having seen I was the victim of some very serious spiritual abuse. Unfortunately, books like this helped to fuel really unhelpful and harmful belief systems, and contributed towards extremism and paranoia in Christian circles, and I can certainly see how I was influenced by this stuff. More on that later – let’s take a deep dive into the book.

It’s important to note several things about the book’s history and context, which might make your mileage vary with it, so here’s a quick summary of things you should know.

• It’s American, which gives it a peculiar character that feels a little odd to readers elsewhere. Evangelical Christianity is hugely influential on the country’s politics and culture, far more so than it is in other countries, and there’s far less variation of opinion on a number of issues within American evangelicalism. You can therefore be sure it’s written from a very socially-conservative and right-wing perspective, significantly influenced further by…
• It was written during Reagan’s presidency, which was particularly right-wing and radically conservative in a way previous presidencies hadn’t been. Much like Trump is now, Reagan was loved and admired by the American evangelical right, and his opponents were particularly demonised by them in a way other politicians weren’t. This is worth bearing in mind throughout the book as the culture in which it is set.
• It’s very much a product of its time in terms of what Christians were concerned about, and at the time there was widespread paranoia about occult and New Age belief systems. These are central to the plot in a way that really highlights how afraid Christians were of this stuff back then. It also represents a view on “spiritual warfare” that was very much of its time, and has subsequently shifted somewhat.
• It represents a very niche theological view that was popular at the time, but has only ever been adopted by a tiny minority of Christians, and has never been mainstream. This is particularly important, because although the author wrote the book as a piece of fiction, he based it on a couple of Bible verses that do some very heavy lifting in terms of the importance of spiritual conflict, and because it supports the beliefs of some very uncompromising and committed Christians, it’s been treated as “gospel” by a lot of readers, and has been hugely influential for that reason.

Right – let’s summarise the plot.

The book is set in the small all-American town of Ashton, and primarily follows the lives of a pastor, Hank Busche, and a newspaper owner, Marshall Hogan. Essentially, they discover a conspiracy by a shadowy group of people to take over the town, and this group is revealed to be deeply involved in New Age/pagan/occult/mystic practices. A professor at the local college is getting students involved in meditation and yoga as a means of influencing them, and deeper down, a shadowy organisation is embezzling funds and forcing people out of their homes and businesses. It’s revealed that these people are all under demonic influence.

The only person standing up to them is the pastor Hank Busche, and his “remnant” of loyal believers, who pray and worship constantly so that God’s angels can fight the demons and free the town.

I don’t consider this a spoiler at all, because after all, it’s a Christian book, so…guess what, everyone? God wins! Hallelujah!

The whole thing has clearly been influenced by supernatural horror writing, and I’ve often heard Peretti described as the “Christian Stephen King”, which I think is a huge insult to King, because he’s an original and talented writer. Peretti is neither of these things. Without even digging in to what’s wrong with the ideas and opinions expressed in this book, it’s shockingly badly written, with terrible dialogue, horrifically shallow two-dimensional characters, and it’s blindingly obvious right from the start who the Good Guys and Bad Guys are. Even if you were to ignore the whole God vs. Satan thing, and treat it purely as a piece of fictional horror, it’s bland, unsubtle, tedious and turgid stuff that feels like a serious effort to plod through. Like a lot of Christian fiction, it feels like it’s written to elicit very specific reactions from its readers, who aren’t expected to question or criticise the central ideas presented. Essentially, you’re meant to be whipped up into a frenzy by it without actually thinking too hard as to why.

This, to me, is just about the worst aspect of the book – it’s meant to make you an extremely committed and uncompromising Christian who spends your entire life battling for God, regardless of how tough and difficult that gets. Believe me, it can get very tough indeed, but it’s never actually good enough, and living a life that unbalanced and that extreme can do a lot of harm – I speak from bitter personal experience. It probably won’t surprise you to hear that a lot of the Christians in this book, including the pastor of a large church, are portrayed as fatally compromised. They’re hoodwinked into complacency and led astray by actual demons, to the point where they’re so useless to God that they may as well be literally sacrificing babies to Beelzebub. If you’re a young Christian taking your faith seriously, these ideas are scary. If you believe you’re responsible for fighting actual demons on a day to day basis, and that people might fry in hell for not hearing your testimony, you’re going to end up lying awake at night absolutely shitting yourself over this – again, I’ve been there.

It perpetuates the idea that only a very small minority of people who call themselves Christians are actually any good, and actually doing God’s will, and that, of course, will feed into the massive persecution complex many evangelicals have. The book is extremely clear on the Christians that are any good here, with only a tiny “remnant” being of any use. A lot of them are portrayed as deluded and stupid, and the only Catholic characters in the book are described as “superstitious”. It continues to perpetuate the belief that a supposedly loving God knowingly creates billions of people throughout history that are heading straight for Hell, because only a tiny minority of people in all creation will say the correct magic words and be sufficiently on fire for him.

Another big issue I have with the book is the complete lack of nuance or subtlety in the characters, who are all 100% good or 100% evil, with absolutely nothing in between, and the only way any of the evil characters are redeemed is through conversion to (once again) a very particular form of Christianity. Non-Christian characters are portrayed as either hopelessly lost or unambiguously committed to doing the bidding of demons, or both. None of the characters are morally complex or neutral, and every act of every character has either demons or angels behind it. This is the sort of thing that can make people paranoid and delusional, and read far too much into everyday situations. Thinking that every minor setback or victory in life is controlled by spiritual forces is potentially a very harmful idea, because…it isn’t true, and even the vast majority of Christians don’t think that it is. The simple truth is that the overwhelming majority of our actions, choices and thoughts are morally neutral, and of absolutely no consequence whatsoever in the grand scheme of things. Elevating our everyday struggles to being a GIGANTIC COSMIC BATTLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL does untold damage to perspective, and any form of worldview born of rationality.

The book perpetuates some horrible prejudices, and a non-exhaustive list includes:

• Any form of non-Christian belief, and even a number of mainstream Christian beliefs, are irredeemably evil. Bonus evil points if it happens to be connected with Eastern mysticism or the New Age.
• The secular education system exists to corrupt young and impressionable people, luring them away from God.
• In an increasingly preposterous plot, which starts stupid and gets even sillier, any public institutions and governmental bodies are presented as being infiltrated by some sort of Satanic conspiracy. This has fed into a huge amount of paranoia over the years. It’s implied that the European Union and the United Nations are awash with demonically-influenced conspirators trying to bring about a New World Order.
• The angels, representing good, are all handsome and perfect, and all treat each other with dignity and respect, and the demons, representing evil, are all stereotypically ugly, treating each other with contempt. No-one has any subtlety or complexity here. Oh, and they’re all male, and supposedly from different nations, with some lovely racial stereotypes thrown in for good measure.
• The book sticks to extremely traditional gender roles, and one of the absolute worst aspects of the writing is that any even remotely attractive non-Christian woman is an evil Jezebel lying in wait to tempt the good Christian men away from the straight and narrow. One of the worst plot points, used no less than three times, and once involving a child, is demon-influenced women making false accusations of rape. What the actual fuck? I can’t even begin to imagine what damage that has done over the years to anyone who has been abused by someone in church. It’s one of the most disgustingly nasty aspects of this book, and the author needs to go away and think very hard about what he’s done here.
• No-one in the book seems to have any agency, independence or ability to make decisions for themselves, all being at the whim of unseen spiritual forces.
• Video games, drinking, swearing, gambling and sex are all portrayed extremely negatively, with the author using extremely clumsy language to avoid referring to any of these things in any detail.
• Credit where it’s due, I’m very surprised there wasn’t anything blatantly homophobic in the book, but the author is clearly pretending gay people don’t exist.

The action ramps up a bit at the end, with the pace quickening somewhat, but it’s so blindingly obvious what’s going to happen that it’s all very flat and tedious, and the whole plot just gets silly. Ultimately, all the demons are defeated by a bunch of ordinary people who pray and sing worship songs, and that’s it.

Ultimately, it’s a combination of bad theology, terrible writing, nasty prejudices, ignorant stereotypes, and ridiculous conspiracy theories. It’s a bit ridiculous that it presents supernatural things as real at all, let alone them being neatly categorised into good and evil along very arbitrary lines. Whatever you choose to believe here is just a lifestyle choice, and the idea that there’s spiritual forces working for and against you is just nonsense. I’ve experienced a lot of supposed “signs and wonders” in charismatic churches, and I firmly believe it’s simply a case of people getting hyped up and swept along – likewise the same with any alternative belief system that claims to have supernatural power. If there is a god of any kind out there – and I wasted 25 years of my life trying desperately to keep on the right side of him – I can assure you that he/she/it is very distant and doesn’t care about what’s going on in your life at all.  Honestly, this book is absolutely batshit nonsense, and has done a lot of harm. Please, whatever your beliefs are, treat it with the contempt it deserves, and do not, under any circumstances, try to live your life according to the ideas it promotes.