Before Frank Peretti I did not know a book could do that.

I did not know a story could make you feel like the walls of the room you were sitting in were thinner than you thought. Like something was operating just on the other side of what your eyes could see. Like the spiritual world was not a theological concept but an actual place with actual activity and actual stakes.

This Present Darkness did that to me.

Peretti built a world where angels and demons were fighting over a small town. Not metaphorically. Literally. Physically. You would be reading about a pastor trying to save his church and then Peretti would flip to the spiritual realm where actual beings were in combat over that same moment. The things happening invisibly were driving the things happening visibly. The two worlds were locked together in a war most of the characters could not see.

I had grown up in church. I believed in spiritual warfare in the way you believe things you have been taught. Academically. Doctrinally. Peretti made me feel it. He made it cinematic and immediate and real in a way that no sermon ever had.

And then he did it again in Piercing the Darkness. The sequel. I read that one in five days. Five days for a book that size because I could not slow down. I needed to know what happened.

That was the first time I understood what a writer could actually do. Not just tell a story. Build a world. Make the invisible visible. Give the reader something they will carry with them long after the last page.

That is what I have been chasing ever since.

Stephon Rudd