The Road To Hell by Jess Hanna
The Road To Hell is Jess Hanna’s début novel and what a suspenseful, can’t put down ride it is!
Hanna has a successfully created a true to the Biblical record of spiritual warfare, the lengths satan and his demons will go to in order to deceive and destroy a Christian’s faith and relationship with God as well as to continue their rebellion against God.
Hanna has developed some very believable and relational characters, mainly Luke and Mike, being the main ones. He has not made them to be super spiritual, they certainly show their faith wavering in the face of the adverse situations they find themselves in.
The antogonist, Drake, is portrayed as a pompous, ego maniac who evolves into a demon possessed pawn in satan’s quest to destroy as many believer’s and non believer’s lives as possible. I can see how this transformation would be possible and from the little I do know about demon possession, the way Hanna has portrayed this transformation and possession is very plausible and most likely the way it happens.
The author has described Luke and Mike’s experience of Hell as very graphic and I must confess, I was very tense with heart beating fast and a bit of a sweat as I was reading this even the repeated accounts of the same.
I appreciated his inclusion of how some pastor’s water down the issue of Hell or even discredit its existence, as expressed by Drake and Pastor Tom. This doctrine/attitude is delivered in some churches and that is a very tragic situation. It was also reassuring to see how Tom has a change of attitude if and only due to him being open to the revelation of the Spirit through Ryan and Samantha and the Spirit revealing Scriptures to him about the reality of Hell.
The spiritual warfare elements in this novel are very realistic and pretty much how I imagine them and again, from what little I know about this. Reading this novel, (and others in my collection) encourages me to seek more on this and to increase my knowledge of how our enemy works and his strategies and the biblical and spiritual weaponry at our disposal.
This is one book I just cannot praise enough. For me, it ranks up there with Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness and its sequel, Piercing The Darkness and a few others in my collection.
Any reader will find this as a cannot put down experience. I stayed up late to finish this and had no regrets, except maybe falling asleep during the church message that morning!!
Hanna has successfully delivered a novel full of entertainment yet sober truth of spiritual warfare, the Word of God, God’s sovereignty, the victorious living Jesus achieved on the Cross for mankind and the battle between satan against Christians and God.
I highly recommend this novel and suggest that Jess Hanna is an author to follow,
being entertained and educated in biblical doctrine in the process. ***** –Peter Younghusband
Published on the Christian Fiction Review