Day 162 – 52 Books in 52 Weeks

After a couple of “heavy” books that took more time to get through than I planned, I switched to something much lighter: Frank Peretti’s Monster.

This is only the second book by Peretti that I’ve ever read. He spoke at our church a few years ago, doing a comedic sketch called The Chair, and I’ve heard him give interviews and such – and have always found him interesting. I have several of his books, but just haven’t gotten around to reading them. The first book I read was one he co-authored with Ted Dekker called House (reviewed earlier in my blog).

Monster is a fun book. It’s not a horror novel, though there are a couple of gruesome scenes, it’s just a good suspense book.

It starts out typically enough with a husband and wife on a hike, a beast you can’t see, the wife gets taken by the beast and the hunt ensues. But where most suspense novels follow the predictable path and work on only building suspense, Peretti throws in an actual plot and characters you really come to know and like.

There are a couple of different themes that run through the book and alongside the hunt for the monster is a little jaunt into the discussion of creationism vs evolution. It’s funny how I started this blog back on January 1 with the first book being Darwin’s The Origin of Species and how every other book I’ve picked up since then (even non-Christian books) have been anti-Darwinism. Even in the bio of Hitler that I just read, it shows how Hitlers social-Darwinistic views led to the massacre of millions of people.

But I digress.

Peretti’s book is a very quick read (only took me two nights to get through), it’s full of suspense, and yet gets you thinking about certain views. He doesn’t “push” his Christian beliefs on you, he just kinda lays out a couple of questions for you to ruminate over.

Anyway, I’m not going to get into any specifics because I don’t want to ruin the story for anyone who hasn’t read the book yet. However, at the end of it all, the girl is saved from the monster (which really isn’t ruining the story – it’s pretty obvious from page one that she’ll live), but Peretti leaves the reader with this question: was the real monster an “animal” or the human that created the “animal?”

Read the book and draw your own conclusions.