Frank E. Peretti (1951) is een bestsellerauteur van bovennatuurlijke thrillers. Frank Peretti richt zich met name op christelijke thema’s, en dan vooral op de geestelijke strijd. Peretti is geboren in Canada en opgegroeid in Seattle. Hij woont nu met zijn vrouw in het noorden van Idaho. Naast schrijven speelt hij ook banjo in de countryband Northern Cross.
Peretti is een geboren verteller; in zijn jeugd hingen de buurtkinderen al aan zijn lippen. Soms is zijn verteltrant ietwat mysterieus. Wat is visioen, wat werkelijkheid? De lezers moeten hierbij steeds zijn bedoelingen voor ogen houden. Het gaat hem erom christenen levensecht neer te zetten: hun visie op de wereld, hun geloof in Gods Woord en de toepassing ervan in de levenspraktijk. Tegelijk wil Peretti de kerk een spiegel voorhouden. De echte Jezus is groter dan alle verhalen die mensen om Hem heen kunnen weven.
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Frank E. Peretti was born in Canada and raised in Seattle, Washington. Peretti was a natural storyteller who, as a child in Seattle, regularly told stories to neighborhood children. After graduating from high school, he began playing banjo with a local bluegrass group. Later, he studied English, screen writing and film at UCLA, and then assisted his father in pastoring a small Assembly of God church. In 1983, he gave up his pastoring position and began taking construction jobs to make ends meet.
Early Writing Career
While working at a ski factory, Peretti wrote and published a well-received adventure story for kids, The Door in the Dragon's Throat (1985). A year later, he published This Present Darkness (1986), his most famous and popular novel to date. This Present Darkness was not an immediate success, but gradually word began to spread, and then sales rocketed sky-high. The book remained on the Christian Booksellers Association's top ten best-sellers list for over 150 consecutive weeks, and has currently sold over 2 million copies worldwide.
Peretti followed This Present Darkness with a sequel, Piercing the Darkness (1989), another tremendous success. Combined, This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness have sold 3.5 million copies.
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 three 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 fulltime, releasing Prophet (1992), The Oath (1995), and the The Visitation (1999), as well as adding 4 more titles to The Cooper Kids Adventure Series. 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.
Later Writing Career
The turn of the millennium saw Peretti's departure from writing his popular novels. He dwellt on the subject of bullying in his non-fiction titles No More Victims (2001) and No More Bullies (2003), and in his autobiographical The Wounded Spirit (2000), he relates his childhood struggles with physical disfigurement and examines how society emotionally abuses and scars children.
In 2001, Peretti released Hangman's Curse, the first book in The Veritas Project series for teens. The book was an instant hit among both teens and adults, and was made into a low-budget film in 2004. The second book in The Veritas Project, 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 into The Veritas Project in the future.
Peretti's first full-length novel after 2000 was the thriller, Monster (2005), which played with 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 inspire a movie based on the book. Starring Michael Madsen, the movie debuted at theaters in 2008.
In April 2010, it was announced that Peretti had signed with Howard Books (a division of Simon & Schuster) for a new novel to be published in late 2011. The novel is expected to be released under the title "Illusion" on March 6, 2012.
