Frank Peretti gave me a specific gift that I have never put down.

He showed me how to make the invisible world feel physical.

In This Present Darkness the spiritual realm is not abstract. It is not a theological concept floating somewhere above the story. It is a place with texture and weight and consequence. The demons have bodies. The angels have weapons. The battles are real and the outcomes matter and they show up in the physical world in ways that the characters can feel even when they cannot see the cause.

Peretti flipped between those two worlds — the visible and the invisible — with a confidence that made both feel equally real. A car would not start in the physical world because a demon was sabotaging it in the spiritual one. A pastor would feel sudden courage in the middle of a difficult meeting because an angel had just won a battle in the unseen realm above the room.

I took that framework and made it the foundation of Black Water.

In my story the spiritual world is not metaphor. It is actual. Alan Charms does not imagine the spiritual realm. He enters it. And what happens to him there has real physical effects when he returns. The two worlds are locked together the way Peretti showed me worlds could be locked together. Cause and effect running between the visible and the invisible in both directions.

I did not copy Peretti. But I owe him the idea that a story could work that way. That the seen and the unseen could occupy the same narrative and make each other more real in the process.

That idea changed everything I have written since.

Stephon Rudd