The Cooper Kids Adventure Series Book 1

For about 30-45 minutes most nights of the week, I read to my kids. My son (11) usually sits on the sofa building something with LEGO bricks or with those metal brackets and screws, while my daughter (9) bounces around doing somersaults or dribbling a soccer ball. My wife does her nighttime stretches or—if she can coral her—braid my daughter’s hair whilst I read, and I am forever grateful for such opportunities to enjoy time with my family.

Having recently finished reading The Hobbit, we had to find a new and exciting books for our family time. The selection for this week was the first book of Frank Peretti’s Cooper Kids Adventure Series, The Door in the Dragon’s Throat. We love reading through series, and we’re always looking for new-to-us series to try. I’ve really enjoyed reading Frank Peretti in the past, with books like This Present Darkness and The Oath, though I wasn’t sure how his kids’ books would fair. Overall, I found this book to be an intense adventure that bordered on the limits of my kids’ sensitivities, but it also “opened up the door” for some conversation about topics we normally wouldn’t discuss (i.e. demons).

I shouldn’t have been surprised, of course, by the presence of demons in this tale…but I was. I was as intrigued as my kids were by the mystery that shrouded the massive door hidden beneath the deserts of the fictitious nation of Nepur, somewhere in the Middle East. But then we discovered through the adventures of Jay and Lila Cooper that the door is the same as that which the Apostle John mentions in Revelation 9, the door that presently closes off the entrance to the bottomless pit, holding back millions of demons which seek to spread pain and death across the planet. That was a bit of a shocker.

I definitely do not deny the reality or power of angels and demons, and I know they have played, do play, and will play an integral part in the unseen world, sometimes even becoming obvious to us humans. Still, when it comes to fictionalizing them or talking to them in real life, I am way beyond cautious. The incidents we see in Scripture are descriptions not prescriptions, and we need to be incredibly careful that we not “anoint” ourselves with power that God alone holds. Whole sects within Christianity proper tend to overemphasize the spiritual realm and their “power” within it, communicating to demons and angels both due to some extrabiblical anointing they’ve claimed, much to the detriment of their faith in God and His Word. To put it bluntly, I believe in Ephesians 6 and in the rarity of exorcisms, but not in anointed exorcists or in the magic words they speak.

Thus, the scenes where Jack screams, “We plead the blood of Jesus to protect us and conquer this thing!” (110) and “rebukes” the demons with: “I come against you in the name of Jesus…and I command you to get back in there!” (119) made me leery. This stuff just isn’t biblical, but boy is it ever popular! I honestly didn’t want to read these statements as I came to them, because they reminded me of listening to a 10yo kid at my son’s school who quoted The Exorcist, thinking he was quoting the Bible: “The power of Christ compels you!!” It made my skin crawl.

At just 7 chapters and 125 pages, this isn’t a long tale, and despite the questionable speedbumps just mentioned, we clipped right along through it. It contains one fast-paced scrape after another, with cliffhangers at every chapter’s end, and the least amount of resolution at the end of a book that I’ve read in a long time. For an adventure novel geared towards Christian youth, I liked it. Whether or not we’ll continue with the next books in the series has yet to be seen.

©2022 E.T.

Read More from Frank Peretti:

• The Door in the Dragon’s Throat (1985)
• This Present Darkness (1986)
• The Oath (1995)
• The Visitation (1999)