ARTICLE: Saint John Wayne and the Dragon

“The Oath,” by Frank Peretti (Word, 550 pp.; $23.99, hardcover).

A landscape photographer finds a promising site in the remote Pacific Northwest. While spending time getting to know this pristine setting, he meets up with a local woman. Having traded the ideals of romance for the hard realities of a bad marriage, she sees this stranger as a portal into another, better world. A torrid affair ensues.

Does she run off with the photographer in hopes of greener pastures? Or does she decide that while domestic realities may not be romantic, her place is beside her less-than-adequate husband? Neither. Both she and the photographer get eaten by a dragon.

“Toto, I don’t think we are in Madison County anymore.”

No, this trip over the rainbow has dropped us into the world of Frank Peretti, the great fundamentalist novelist and the father of blockbuster Christian fiction. Author of “This Present Darkness,” “Piercing the Darkness,” and “The Prophet” (with combined sales figures in the tens of millions), this former part-time Assemblies of God associate pastor has created an alternative Christian universe where the faithful love to visit.

And why shouldn’t we love it here? In a Peretti novel, just as in a John Wayne movie, it’s easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. (Tip: Bad guys tend to get called by their last names, good guys by their first.) Our team is made up of tall, strong, courageous guys and a few gals, usually housewives, who are prayer warriors with skirts. The bad guys are creepy, greedy, and sleazy. And they get their butts kicked in the end–by Jesus, of course.

That’s pretty much the plot of Peretti’s latest thriller, “The Oath.” This time John Wayne is Steve Benson, the brother of the eaten photographer (“I just want to find out what happened”). Even though he is unsaved when the story begins, people tend to call him “Steve,” so we know good things are in store for him.

In the other corner is Harold Bly and his cronies (“Bly owns this town”). The town is Hyde River, a small mining town lost in time in the mountainous Northwest. How isolated is Hyde River? It’s so cut off that a dragon has been killing people for a hundred years and no one outside the town knows about it. And those in town don’t talk about it. In fact, people get beaten or killed if they do talk about it. Let’s just call the town River.

An interviewer once asked Peretti what he thought of the novels by Southern Baptist John Grisham. “His characters are too gray; it’s too hard to tell the good guys from the bad.” That about sums up the Peretti theory of characterization. If you turn these characters sideways, they disappear. Not that this is a criticism, mind you. People have paid good money for decades to see characters like these at drive-ins: those perennial B-movies with predictable people, plots, and climaxes, but oh, so pleasing.

Pleasing because we don’t have to deal with all those contemporary nuances. In (Hyde) River there are no computers, McDonald’s, or foreign trade deficits, no video cameras, gay activists, or now protests. Just regular folk doing evil things the old-fashioned way–because they’re bad. John Wayne would feel right at home.

The only intrusion of modern times into River is Tracy Ellis, a female police officer. Peretti has a hard time with this representative of modern womanhood. Beautiful, athletic, courageous, she gets called by her first name; she befriends and saves Steve; she dislikes and fights Bly. Still, she shuns the faith and commits adultery (with pre-Christian Steve). In most every way her character parallels Steve’s. Except for her fate: dragon manure. So much for modern feminism.

About the only element in the book that transcends its B-movie trappings is the dragon itself. Clever, subtle, surprising, it creeps into the novel like a nightmare. The dragon teleports us back beyond 1950s cinema to the world of ancient morality tales. Because besides hunting, charring, and munching on the town’s residents, the dragon is theological. He is sin. As in he only dines on the guilty, the unredeemed. As in he won’t eat real Christians (though a liberal pastor gets toasted).

The dragon is Peretti’s sermon and what makes “The Oath” an allegory at heart. But it is John Bunyan sprinkled with Stephen King. When the dragon hunts you, theology stays far from your mind; you tend to focus on teeth and claws. So how does John Wayne deal with his foe? Victory comes when the muscular new Christian submits to General Jesus’ battle plan. “Listen, pilgrim, it wasn’t me. I only did what I was told.”

People must like this technicolor sermon, because they are buying it in droves, causing even “Time” and the “New York Times” to write articles on the phenomenon. But is it really such a big deal? So we get a good escapist romp where sin is sin, the bad guys lose, and Jesus gives the victory salute. If that is cause for celebration, then we are desperate for good news.