Just Finished Reading Frank Peretti's The Oath

A few years ago, a hardback copy of Frank Peretti's novel The Oath found its way into my garage...we're not exactly sure how it got there.  It has a strong evangelical Christian orientation while its genre is similar to the horror fiction of Stephen King...albeit without the latter's usually strong profanity sprinkled among the pages.  I finally had enough of walking past this book and picked it up to read...it was pretty much the way I expected it to be...

The premise of The Oath is basically a bargain with the devil, instituted by the corrupt owner of a mine in Hyde River, an isolated western American town in the late 1800s, and signed by that community's residents, that created a rapacious, predatory beast which devours those who sin and run afoul of the town boss.   Fast forward to the present as Steve Benson, an agnostic scientist, arrives to investigate the mysterious death of his brother...ostensibly by a rogue grizzly bear.  But the autopsy reveals a different sort of attacker...and Evelyn, his brother's wife, has witnessed the event but is suppressing her memories of it.  Hyde River's citizens are all hush-hush about the incident...except for born-again Christian Levi Cobb, who understands the underlying mystery...

Evangelical Christian symbols pervade The Oath, as I expected that they would...the message is clear: sin is inevitable and will ultimately consume you unless you make God first in your life.  I have read literature with Christian analogies but which isn't quite so direct about it...C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings are two examples.  Even Stephen King's novels usually have a strong moral message to them and contain struggles that could only be seen as spiritual warfare.  So yes, The Oath was definitely predictable about the general flow of the story, as well as its conclusion...and it was clear that the overriding intent of the author was to present the gospel message of Jesus Christ to the reader.  No problem with that, as far as I'm concerned.  It just bothers me that some folks apparently want to just live inside their own bubble when it comes to reading literature, listening to music, or watching television, a bubble that excludes material even created by others of their own faith but which is not theologically "pure" enough for them...