Фрэнк Перетти: Құдайға сенуші жазушының өмірі мен шығармалары

Canadian American author

Frank Edward Peretti (born January 13, 1951) is a New York Times best selling author of Christian fiction, whose novels primarily focus on the supernatural. as of 2012, his works have sold over 15 million copies worldwide. Peretti is best known for his novels This Present Darkness (1986) and Piercing the Darkness (1989). Peretti has held ministry credentials with the Assemblies of God, and formerly played the banjo in a bluegrass band called Northern Cross. He now lives in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho with his wife, Barbara.

Frank E. Peretti was born in Lethbridge in southern Alberta, Canada, but raised in Seattle, Washington, for most of his life. As a child, he had a cystic hygroma, a facial tumor which affected his ability to speak until later receiving surgery and speech therapy. He became a natural storyteller who regularly told monster stories to neighborhood children. After graduating from high school, he began playing banjo with a local bluegrass group. He married his wife, Barbara, in 1972. Later, he studied English, screen writing and film at UCLA, and assisted his father in pastoring a small Assembly of God church on Vashon Island from 1978 to 1983. That year, he gave up his pastoring position and began taking construction jobs to make ends meet. The book remained on the Christian Booksellers Association's top ten best sellers list for over 150 consecutive weeks, and has as of 2013 sold over 2.7 million copies worldwide. Peretti also took the characters from his first work The Door in the Dragon's Throat and used them to write The Cooper Kids Adventure Series, releasing seven more titles that contained the same Indiana Jones style adventures similar to The Door in the Dragon's Throat. Throughout the 1990s, Peretti continued to write full time, releasing Prophet (1992), The Oath (1995), and The Visitation (1999). The Oath, generally regarded as one of Peretti's greater works, has sold more than one million copies, and received the ECPA Gold Medallion Book Award for Best Fiction in 1996. The Visitation landed at #19 on the New York Times Bestseller list and was adapted into a film in 2006.

The turn of the millennium saw Peretti's departure from writing his popular novels. He wrote a 2000 memoir, The Wounded Spirit, which covered his struggles as a child with a facial tumor, which caused him to be mocked by other children and retreat to solitude until it was eventually treated with multiple surgeries. He dwelled on the subject of bullying in his non fiction titles No More Victims (2001) and No More Bullies (2003). The book was an instant hit among both teens and adults, and was made into a low budget 2003 film of the same name. The second book in the series, Nightmare Academy, was published in 2002 with equal success. The two books together sold more than 500,000 copies, according to Thomas Nelson Publishers. Peretti has mentioned that there may be more possible entries in the Veritas Project series. Peretti's first full length novel after 2000 was the 2005 thriller Monster, which played with the Bigfoot legend and explored issues surrounding the "survival of the fittest" and creationist based objections to evolution. Monster hit the New York Times Bestseller list at #34 on its first week and rose to #29 on its second week. In April 2006, Peretti and fellow supernatural author Ted Dekker co authored the novel House. It received mixed reviews from Peretti and Dekker fans, but was popular enough to be adapted as the 2008 film House, starring Michael Madsen. In April 2010, it was announced that Peretti had signed with Howard Books (a division of Simon & Schuster) for a new novel. The novel, Illusion, was published in March 2012.

Peretti's work, with its themes of spiritual warfare, has been described belonging to "an older tradition of believers, including C. S. Lewis, John Bunyan, and John Milton (and before them, medieval and ancient apocalyptic writers), who depicted angels and humans at war." In addition to his appearance in Hangman's Curse, Peretti has had a voice role in Flo, the Lying Fly, the second animated entry in the Hermie and Friends series for children. He has also made a number of videos (and associated audio tapes and books) in which he takes on the persona of Mr. Henry, a slightly eccentric inventor and Bible teacher. While the format is unusual, it contains none of the theology of his adults' books.

Peretti has been hailed as "America's hottest Christian novelist" and has been called a "sanctified Stephen King" and "the Stephen King of Christian fiction". In comparison to King, however, Peretti says, "Stephen King doesn't have any supernatural good guys. Usually the supernatural is evil, and it's up to the humans to deal with it. In my books, I introduce a supernatural good to combat the supernatural evil. At least you've got a fighting chance. "Unreliable source: date=June 2020

Peretti's fictional portrayal of spiritual warfare reflects in part his background in the Assemblies of God and the contemporary focus of Pentecostal writings on the demonic. His concept of Territorial Spirits reigning over cities or "spiritual mapping" is paralleled in the Neo charismatic world,), Larry Lea, Ed Silvoso and Ed Murphy. His books have been considered to reflect the New Christian Right. As his novels have been widely sold and read throughout Evangelical, Charismatic and Pentecostal churches, Peretti's fiction has excited the imaginations of clergy and laity alike on the subject of spiritual warfare. Michael Maudlin of Christianity Today reports hearing that some readers have been so enthused they have declared that This Present Darkness is the best book ever written after the Bible. He has also described its theology as "closer to primitive dualism than traditional Christian theism." Some critical reservations have been expressed by a number of Evangelical and Pentecostal writers that many readers are using Peretti's novels as manuals on prayer, exorcism, spiritual warfare and as guidebooks about dangers of the New Age movement. For example, Kim Riddlebarger expresses alarm that many readers have "redefined their entire worldview based upon a novel" and insists that the Bible does not call upon Christians to "engage in spiritual warfare as a combat between angels and demons". Peretti has commented regarding this use of his work. His 1992 novel Prophet included a disclaimer stating "This novel is a creative work of fiction imparting spiritual truth in a symbolic manner, and not an emphatic statement of religious doctrine", and upon publication of The Oath he stated, "If you really want to study spiritual warfare, read the Bible. Don't read my book." Irving Hexham rejects Peretti's depiction of the New Age as confirming a negative stereotype. Hexham observes that Peretti's novels reflect the anxieties that many fundamentalist and evangelical Christians have about secular society, the mass media, the social sciences and tertiary education. He is also disturbed "to see the way Frank Peretti has become a popular and oft quoted authority on the New Age" because "his actual qualifications in religious matters are minimal". Andrew Connolly notes that "these enemies, united under a New Age banner, are motivated not simply by an alternative religious ideology, but by demons" in Peretti's work. as well as for fiction by Pat Robertson and Chuck Colson. others have noted his writings encourage readers to take political action. Theological studies professor André Gagné, who has written on the Christian dominionist New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), states that its founder C. Peter Wagner "regarded Frank Peretti's novels as the best illustration of actual spiritual warfare." Religious studies scholar Damon T. Berry argues that despite the books' fictional settings, the spiritual warfare and demonology presented – also seen in the NAR's prophecies regarding Trump – are intended to be true to life. The theme of false sexual abuse allegations against Peretti's protagonists by women and children – because they are possessed by demons – has been mentioned by several reviewers. One reviewer describes it as "a terrible willingness to forgive child abuse and sexual assault if the accused was a powerful man and the accuser was a woman or child" mirrored in American evangelicalism, while another notes that not only are all of the "victims" depicted as "demonically possessed liar[s]", but those in helping roles are also "villains": "Those who are on the frontline of helping children and survivors – public school teachers, therapists, social workers, child advocates – are cast as evil". Peretti's books have been translated to dozens of languages, among them Chinese, Croatian, French, German, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian and Swedish.