The Oath

Frank Peretti

I got this a few years back from my mother as a Christmas present. I pointed out to her that Peretti is widely known as a Christian author (one would think that the book's publisher, who also releases books by folks like Billy Graham, would have been a giveaway there), and her response was “it certainly doesn't sound like Christian fiction. It sounds like Stephen King.” And Frank Peretti is, without doubt, the Christian version of Mr. King, both in subject matter and in sales figures that make the rest of the publishing industry quake in fear. One thinks that when Frank Peretti grows up, he wants to BE Stephen King. And with The Oath, he comes very, very close.

There's something very large, very nasty, and very hungry hanging around near the town of Hyde River. When it kills and half-eats an outsider, nature photographer Cliff Benson, Benson's brother Steve starts poking around. As he gets closer to the identity of the killer, however, he finds out that the town doesn't necessarily want to find out what killed Cliff Benson—and may go to great lengths to stop Steve from doing so, either.

Good, scary, keep-you-up-at-night stuff. And for the first four hundred pages of this five-hundred-odd page book, that's what it remains. The only thing during this portion of the book that keeps Peretti from achieving the standard of writing set by horror authors like Stephen King and Dan Simmons is that Peretti isn't quite as good at writing his minor characters; as with a lot of lesser lights in the horror genre, Peretti sets up some of his minor characters with the “I'm going to die in a few pages” signs on their foreheads and then leads them to their grisly ends. (For the record, at least Peretti's minor characters usually stick around for a while, and do have some other function aside from dying.) There's no real life in them the way there is in Peretti's major characters. And while this makes the book suffer, it's a forgivable thing, especially when the book is as fast-paced and readable as this one is.

Also in those first four hundred pages, before I start firing off criticisms at the end, Peretti does a great job with his symbolism and the obvious points he's trying to get across. Let's face it, you pick up a book by a Christian author published by a well-known Christian imprint, you know you're in for an object lesson. And in the first two-thirds of this book, Frank Peretti shows you what the word “parable” means. Everything is low-key, well-done, visible to those who know what to look for. Peretti even takes the secular convention of the local religious nut and bends it to his own ends in a wonderful way; Levi Cobb wouldn't be out of place in almost ay eighties horror novel I've ever read. Had he stayed right where he was and kept going in this vein till the end, The Oath might have hit my top ten reads of the year list.

Then everything went downhill… and fast.

The book's climax throws everything you just read about above out the window. Symbolism? Subtlety? Well-drawn characters? See you later. Peretti takes the velvet cover off the sledgehammer and starts beating. The message doesn't just become the medium, it overwhelms it. Those of you who have heard me trying to illustrate this particular point and haven't been able to follow what I'm talking about, read this book. You can see both good socially-conscious writing and bas socially-conscious writing in one fell swoop, and because you're still in the same story, it becomes obvious which is which.

Peretti's already got the skills to be a major player in the field, and judging from the first four hundred pages of The Oath, he's already better than most of the competition. Now, if he'd take a few tips in parable writing from authors like Madeleine L'Engle or Francois Mauriac, he could turn sales of two million copies into sales ten times that, and get his message across to secular readers as well—for isn't that the whole point?