Darkness Books in Order

The Darkness series brings together This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness, the novels that first made Frank Peretti a household name among many Christian fiction readers. Both books imagine small American towns as battlegrounds where angels and demons clash for influence while ordinary people make choices that tip the scales.

In This Present Darkness, the college town of Ashton looks calm on the surface. Underneath, a New Age organization is quietly buying power, and key leaders in the community have already been drawn into its orbit. A skeptical newspaper editor and a young pastor begin to compare notes on odd events, not realizing that angelic warriors are fighting over every breakthrough in their investigation and every whispered prayer from a tiny band of believers.

Piercing the Darkness widens the lens to Bacon’s Corner, where a Christian school faces a crushing lawsuit, a single father suddenly loses custody of his children, and a young woman named Sally Roe runs from memories she can barely process. As court cases and public opinion swirl, unseen armies clash over religious freedom, truth, and the lives of wounded people caught in the crossfire.

Peretti structures the novels like thrillers—interlocking story lines, conspiracies, narrow escapes—while cutting away to scenes in the spiritual realm. Angels strategize, demons whisper lies, and the strength of each side rises and falls in ways that mirror, in fictional form, the power of prayer and compromise in the lives of the human characters.

Readers come to these books for different reasons. Some are gripped by the fast pace and horror‑tinged atmosphere; others value the way the stories make the idea of spiritual warfare feel concrete. Either way, the Darkness novels are best approached as imaginative parables about vigilance, intercession, and the dangers of thinking life is only what we can see on the surface.