It's not the book you want; it's the book you need.

I recently picked up this book for a second read. I first read it 7 years ago and, like the other reviewer, I was disappointed about the lack of detail about ghosts, demons and so forth. No, Peter Bolt doesn't tell you everything you want to know. No, you don't find out how houses get haunted or whether mediums really contact the dead.

What you get is an engaging exposition of what the Bible says about the spiritual underworld and what the gospel has to do with it. Bolt does his job as a good preacher ought to: sticking to what the Bible says, giving biblical weight to each subtopic, communicating in a way anyone can understand, making Jesus the point of the whole thing. He doesn't try to satisfy our curiosities, just as the Bible doesn't. He does connect his subject matter with Jesus Christ, just as the bible does. If you want a brief statement of the book's core message, read Hebrews 2:14-15.

I appreciated the book's structure, starting at the Bible's margins and moving to the centre of its message. I also appreciated the analogy to the criminal underworld. It furnishes many helpful illustrations.

I recommend it for both unbelievers and believers. Readers should go in understanding what kind of book this is and what it seeks to do, to avoid disappointment. I appreciated it more on my second read, as a more mature believer. That's because I understand better my great need of being pointed to the Lord Jesus Christ.

[Note] This review was transferred from our old online store which did not give ratings. But this new store requires ratings. So in order to transfer them we have tried to give a rating which reflects the content of the review. So you may prefer to ignore the rating and just read the review.
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A few years ago I had a conversation with a good friend of mine, who is not Christian, about what Christians believe regarding ghosts, evil spirits and the occult. She wanted to know if houses could really be haunted, and things like that. It was a topic I had not really thought much about, and so I had to admit to my friend that I couldn't really answer a lot of her questions. She was just appreciative that I bothered to try; apparently another Christian she asked wanted to avoid the subject altogether.

I bought this book to both educate myself and help my friend. Now I've read it, I feel confident to give it to her (I've made the mistake of giving a book to someone without reading it first before....never again!).

This book was both surprising and disappointing. The positives about it are also the negatives. I was disappointed that it skated over the issues and questions likely to intrigue non-Christians. But I was surprised and pleased that it so strongly points readers to the gospel and uses every opportunity to evangelise a potentially non-Christian audience. For that reason, I WOULD give this book to my friend (presuming she is still interested in this topic). I'm just wondering if she will be annoyed. I get Peter Bolt's position - we don't want to focus on the underworld, particularly as the Bible itself is somewhat vague about it; we want to focus on Jesus and how He has defeated the underworld. However, even I came away from this book a bit confused. In Chapter 3: Underworld Beings he writes about the English 'word' demon (which we hear so much in the gospels) coming from the Greek word 'daemon' which really means 'ghost' - so often we think there are four species in the universe (God, humans, angels and demons). So, does that mean the demons which were possessing people in the gospels are actually ghosts of dead people? (pages 52-53). That is still unclear to me.

Readers of this book will have to be satisfied with not delving too deeply into underworld issues, but will instead encounter the living Jesus who has defeated the underworld on the cross.