The Oath

I got bored with this and stopped reading it about 200 pages in.

The Oath is perhaps Peretti's best work. While this book does not follow his Darkness sequels (no angel and demon confrontations), it paints a very vivid picture of what happens when people begin to try to hide their sins from the world and reject that God exists. Except that the sins of Hyde River are personified in a living being whose mere mention casts fear and anger into peoples minds and hearts. For this reason, the town of Hyde River has kept its past a secret from outsiders. It is a town controlled by sin and fear. And these two aspects of their lives are preyed upon by the descendent of the town founder Benjamin Hyde and the last living family member, Harold Bly. But when an outsider is killed by the town's greatest secret, the people find hiding their past extremely difficult. Especially since the death of the outsider was witnessed by his wife. And even more so when the victim's brother begins to pry into the lives of the town people, uncover their darkest secret, and solve the mystery of his brother's death.What tale Peretti spins is not a confrontation in the spiritual realm with angels and demons battling for the souls of mortal men, but a very vivid picture of what can happen when people reject God and begin to think they can live how they want.

THE OATH is about as close to the "horror" genre as Christian fiction gets. In the backwoods town of Hyde River, somewhere in the northwest, strange things are happening and people are disappearing. Steve Benson's brother falls victim and, when the death is chalked up to a bear attack, out of disbelief Steve begins to examine the evidence with more scrutiny. What he finds is utterly shocking. Hyde River has a secret. A secret that binds the town into what can only be described as an chilling pact with pure evil. And now that he knows what it is, he must be silenced.Using graphic imagery that at times borders on shocking, Peretti unfolds a monsterously suspensful tale that will grip your heart till the very last page. The faint of heart may wish to pass this one over, but for those who love suspense this is a winner. It's a dark, forboding story, but in the end that darkness only makes the Light shine brighter. THE OATH gets five stars.

A fan of Peretti's from the first chapter of "This Present Darkness," I was not in the least disappointed in "The Oath." While "This Present Darkness" and "Piercing the Darkness" were true to life from start to finish, this book contained a different approach. Although I enjoyed every minute of it, there were several times during the reading that I stopped and thought, "This is so unreal. This could never happen." However, it was toward the end of the book that I realized it was a parody (in the loosest sense of the word) of what takes place in the spiritual world. The dragon that controlled the town was Sin, and although sin can never take a fleshly form and go around devouring unsuspecting townsfolk, in a spiritual sense, it does just exactly that. While we cannot see a smelly black substance oozing from our chests when we get sin in our lives, if we could see through spiritual eyes, we really would see a blackened heart, full of sin. As in the book, it is when the smallest sins get into our hearts and turn them "black," and we have removed ourselves from the realm of God's protection that the big "dragon" can come and eat us up. It is obvious that Peretti really knows something about the spiritual world, and this book, when taken in the right context, can help the reader to understand what is actually going on although we can't see it in the natural.