Hi and welcome back! As is our custom, on this day we feast again on the 1986 bestselling fantasy novel and heartburn-inducer by Frank Peretti, This Present Darkness. In this installment, Marshall Hogan rushes off to rescue Ted Harmel, the previous owner of his newspaper, from whatever’s terrifying him so much. Today, Lord Snow Presides over evangelicals’ conceptualization of demonic attacks in This Present Darkness.
(Please click here to find the master list of previous This Present Darkness discussions. Also, any page numbers cited come from the 2003 paperback edition of the book. All quoted material, in blockquotes or in the post itself, comes from actual sources; I don’t use scare quotes without telling you I’m doing it. Additionally, Peretti abuses ellipses in his writing like he’s a big-name evangelical and they’re foodservice workers, so if I skip words in a quote I’ll put my own ellipses into square brackets.)
Chapter 24, This Present Darkness
Only a couple of things really happen in this chapter, so I’ll also fill in the blanks with who these people are to save time later.
Marshall Hogan, the newspaper editor (and one of the two heroes of the novel, along with Hank Busche, the TRUE CHRISTIAN™ control-freak pastor), rushes off to rescue Ted Harmel after receiving a frantic, terrified-sounding call from him in the middle of the night. Ted was the former editor of the newspaper.
The villains of the story, the Cabal of Satanic Wiccans (or Wiccan Satanists, Whatevs) (CSWWSW), ran Ted out of town on a rail after inventing some really awful child-abuse allegations. The book insists constantly that these allegations are completely and totally not true EVER! OMG, how could you even THINK that of fine upstanding Ted Harmel?!?
However, when he finally arrives at Ted’s new digs, he discovers a ghastly sight: the cabin’s a complete mess, and Ted’s died by suicide. Yikes!
From Ted’s home phone, Hogan contacts the police in Windsor anonymously to report Ted’s death. Firstly, he doesn’t want to involve the Ashton police, since he thinks they’re corrupt and implicit in whatever’s going on. Second, Windsor’s actually closer to Ted’s home anyway.
After that, Hogan calls Bernice. Yeah, because he hasn’t done quite enough ridiculously, galactically stupid things yet today. With coded language, he tells Bernice what’s happened and asks her to go check on Kevin Weed (the ex-boyfriend of Susan Jacobson; he’s been giving them vaguely-semi-valuable information about the Cabal and its leaders).
Next, Marshall makes his way next to the home of Eldon and Doris Strachan. Eldon Strachan used to work as the dean of Ashton College before the CSWWSW scared him enough to induce him to quit and flee town. Their home is, likewise, a total mess. But they’re totally gone from it.
The cops arrive at Strachan’s home for Plot Reasons just as Marshall’s preparing to leave. He identifies himself and his occupation as a journalist. Naturally, they arrest him anyway.
The deep distress of Ted Harmel
At the tail end of Chapter 23, Ted Harmel calls Marshall Hogan’s home in a blind panic. Repeatedly, he screams for help (p. 219):
“They’re coming for me! They’re all over the place!”
Marshall was awake now. He pressed the receiver to his ear, trying to understand what Ted was blubbering about. “I can’t hear you! What’d you say?”
“They found out I talked! They’re all over the place!”
Notably, he never reveals to Marshall who “they” are. In a previous meeting (in Chapter 19), Ted hinted about the beings he thinks have been making his life miserable ever since he turned on the Cabal and its sub-leader, Juleen Langstrat. At the time, he described his tormentors to Marshall (p. 191-2):
“[. . .] inner teachers, spirit guides, ascended masters. . . [. . .] Beings . . . entities.”
Marshall didn’t know what to make of it then, so he largely ignored it. Like, literally, I mean. He never engages with the idea of these being invisible boogeymen.
And he doesn’t when he enters Ted’s home, either.
Another panic attack—er, demonic attack
As Marshall enters the home, already noting numerous signs of violence and destruction outside, he has another panic attack like the one he had much earlier (in Chapter 6). Here, Peretti again describes it for us (p. 221):
And Marshall could feel it, just as strongly as before: that fierce, gut-wrenching terror he had felt that other night. He tried to shake it off, tried to ignore it, but it was there. His palms were slick with sweat; he felt weak.
However, Peretti intends this description not to perfectly apply to a perfectly-earthly panic attack, but as a human response to literal demons in the near vicinity. Indeed, one watches Hogan right then:
Below and above him, a black, leathery wing quietly repositioned. Leering yellow eyes watched his every move. Here, there, over there, all over the room, in the corners of the ceiling, upon the furniture, clinging like insects to the walls, were the demons, some of them letting out little snickers, some of them drooling blood.
Even more demons—and more physically repulsive ones, it seems—lurk in the bedroom. There, Marshall finds Ted Harmel, or rather his body. Harmel still holds a gun in his hand.
As soon as Marshall sees Ted’s body, the demons attack him. They aim for his heart, hundreds of them at once.
The angels’ failure in This Present Darkness
However, a bunch of angels have been right beside Marshall all this time!
Hooray Team Jesus!
The angels’ vorpal blades go snicker-snack through the demons, destroying all of them. After the fight and after ensuring that Marshall’s okay, they go to mourn over Ted’s body. They make this observation (p. 223):
Armoth shook his head and sighed. “As Captain Tal said, Rafar can choose any front he wants, at any time.”
“They have owned and tormented Ted Harmel for a long time,” Senter conceded.
It’s interesting that the angels don’t even wonder about why nobody was keeping an eye on someone they knew was important to their fight to save Ashton. They don’t even wonder why their omnipotent god wasn’t protecting him, if he was that important.
The book has always stressed how spread-thin the angels are here and how little power they can access to cast spells and fight back against the demons. It’s definitely more than a little odd that their god is always presented as omnipotent, and yet this same god seems quite content to let his front-line Marines mount a barely-there opposition to stop the takeover of the entire world by his worst enemy.
The idea that angels can totally absolutely fail against demons sometimes wasn’t part of my belief system until I became a fundagelical, incidentally. Now it seems like a very well-ingrained belief. I sorta see why. They’re just divine messengers/agents/soldiers, not gods themselves. Thus, obviously something else could conceivably defeat them. And what else would really even be fighting them, except demons?
Seeing to Marshall Hogan, finally
After discorporating all the demons in the house, these angels’ current leader, Nathan, returns “back to the immediate business,” which apparently involves “see[ing] to Marshall Hogan.”
Their ward experiences this process in his own non-supernatural way:
Marshall got a grip on himself. For a moment he thought he would really panic, and that would have been the very first time in his life.
I guess he’s clean forgotten about almost taking a baseball bat to his wife in Chapter 6 during his panic attack then. Whatever. Fine. Yep, first time ever, dude, sure.
Afterward, Marshall makes his ridiculously ill-advised phone calls and leaves for Eldon Strachan’s place.
SPEERCHUL WARFARE, Y’ALL!
Let’s circle back to Marshall’s panic attack/demonic attack.
I spent many years tormented by panic attacks before getting real help for them. Actual secular therapy helped so much, whereas prayer and “handing it all to Jesus” never worked. (In fact, I’m about 20 years past my last panic attack so far, though if I ever have another one I won’t be down on myself, don’t worry.)
[2026 note from Cas: Still panic-attack free six years after this post was written. Real therapy works.]
That life experience makes me feel especially offended to see Marshall’s distress attributed to demons. That’s exactly how my fellow Pentecostals saw it, back when I was one of ’em, and I see evangelicals saying the same stuff nowadays. Like they can’t handle the idea that panic attacks are extremely common and very treatable with real therapy and medications.
Nor can they handle the idea that panic attacks, by their very nature, happen when nothing’s actually there to scare the person suffering from them. They’re sort of like a fight-or-flight reaction that occurs without an adequate stimulus in the area right then. Sometimes something that suffers can sorta identify sets them off or triggers them. At other times, they just seem to come out of absolutely nowhere.
But to evangelicals, these experiences must be evidence of demonic attacks.
Demons Around Every Corner.
I actually knew many Christians, including a very dear friend (Marf, twin sister of Bebo) who prayed constantly for help divine help to fight the literal demons she thought were making her feel anxious and depressed. She’d have a “breakthrough,” which is Christianese for her feeling like she’d actually “punched through the ceiling” with prayer to reach her god instead of “bouncing off the ceiling,” and she’d be downright euphoric for a week or two before her symptoms returned. They always returned.
If evangelicals weren’t attributing every bad emotional state they ever had to literal demons, they were otherwise imagining demons behind every single feeling of gloom or unpleasant experience they ever had.
Like if I walked into a torn-up house and saw a newly-deceased person on the floor, I’m sure I’d feel some very intense emotions. I probably wouldn’t have a panic attack in that sense, but rather I’d feel panicky as a direct result of what I saw. Either way, I wouldn’t be reaching for demons as the source of those feelings.
In fact, I’ve been in terrifying, life-threatening, and foreboding situations since my deconversion (they were bad enough that I’m just amazed to be alive sometimes). And weirdly enough, every emotion occurring around those situations could be easily explained naturally.
Nobody needs to point to demons to explain stuff—except, of course, for the people who gain some kind of benefit from pointing in those directions.
Silly, silly Marshall Hogan!
It’s beyond obvious that Frank Peretti wrote this whole scene the way he did on purpose. He wanted to show the difference between what worldly people perceived and what TRUE CHRISTIANS™ knew was totally really happening.
Sure, Marshall Hogan thought he was just panicking generally. He thought his foreboding was just due to the horrifying conditions at the houses he visited, and that when he regained control of himself, he thought it was him doing that difficult work.
But oh, TRUE CHRISTIANS™ know otherwise.
They see the demons watching him. They know the spike of his panic comes from demons literally attacking him and seeking to pierce his very heart to kill him. And they know that only the gentle healing power of angels brought him back from the edge of panic.
Indeed, evangelicals reading this scene would have taken it as a powerful motivation to keep spiritually honing their spiritual mettle on the spiritual fields of spiritual battle. And I suspect that’s how they still take these scenes in Christian movies and books: “SEE? SEE? IT’S ALL REAL!”
So today, Lord Snow Presides over a scene that might well have kick-started evangelicals’ current and growing obsession with spiritual warfare.
NEXT UP: How Ronald J. Sider proposed to fix the big problem of evangelical disobedience.
Lord Snow Presides is our off-topic weekly chat series. Lord Snow presides over a suggested topic for the day, but feel free to chime in with anything on your mind. We especially welcome pet pictures! The series was named for Lord Snow, my recently departed white cat. He knew a lot more than he ever let on.
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