52 - This Present Darkness (feat. Scott Benson)

An important predecessor of spiritual warfare theology is the 1973 book “pigs in the parlor” which has full lists of demons and an entire chapter on exorcising schizophrenia, the darkness duology is basically a narrative grafted on to that book’s ideology.

phenomenal edit on this one

Seeing that cover is going to require 4 1/2 therapy sessions to recover from the PTSD.

Omg is this just shitty American Gods or Good Omens?

I grew up pentecostal! Assembly of God, baby! One larger church we went to had a yearly big budget play about the... End Times! Loudly binding spirits by various names was a fairly regular thing I heard. Peretti's adult books were basically my "discovering Stephen King in middle grade." Even King never wrote anything as scary as "a John Hagee sermon on demons when you're 12" though.

The Frank Peretti books I remember reading as a kid were apparently from _The Cooper Kids Adventures_: https://www.goodreads.com/series/40888-the-cooper-kids-adventures I remember reading _The Door in the Dragon's Throat_: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/365047.The_Door_in_the_Dragon_s_Throat And _The Tombs of Anak_: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199155.The_Tombs_of_Anak And I specifically remember liking the latter one. But then again I was probably a seventh-grader myself at the time! Maybe Frank Peretti is better at YA than grownup novels? (Probably not.) As best I can remember this series was basically an Evangelical Indiana Jones with kid protagonists. In other words it actually had interesting pulp shit going on. (So idk it might actually be enjoyable to read, though it'd be pretty low on my list personally.) _This Present Darkness_ kind of sounds like a joyless version of _Good Omens_, though it was published several years prior. Speaking of weird Evangelical novels, do you think you'll ever do _Pilgrim's Progress_? My main exposure to it was a low-budget slideshow narration movie we watched in Sunday school, and mainly I remember it being depressing lol. Though _Pilgrim's Progress_ is also a bit odd in that it's significant in the history of English literature more generally, rather than just the history of religious literature. (As far as "the first novel in X language" goes, _Don Quixote_ is probably a lot better lol.)

lollll is that music from the social network in the ad break

so much content

he WATT??

the music to the arcade scene was 🔥

Seeing that cover art exhumed a long-dead memory of my mom giving me this book as a gift ~20 years ago. I never ended up reading it because it just didn't seem interesting.

would appreciate a content warning if the episode is going to attack me with takes like "'This Plum is Too Ripe' is the only good song in The Fantasticks"