All Things Bright and Strange by James Markert

 

This book is a mash up of a handful--maybe a large or even double handful--of influences, everything from *Needful Things* to *This Present Darkness* (though without some of the ... problematic stuff of the latter). The people of a town teaming up with angels to cast the devil back out of said town permanently (or at least very long-term) but the angels are themselves ... at least mostly human, and the forces of evil are sensitive to fire as well as apparently every human religion the people of the town can throw at them (every Western Christianity, including at least two specifically American variants, plus Islam and Judaism ... so more like every Abrahamic religion). This was published by a Christian publisher, or at least a Christian publishing division of a publisher, but it's more syncretic or heterodox or something than I would have expected. Also, the town was diverse but unified before the evil thing started driving wedges in it, and one of the wedges was religion; it's hard not to see some sort of subtext there. I was kinda hoping it was going to turn out to be anti-religion (or at least anti-organized religion) but that was probably at least one bridge too far. Oh, well. This isn't a great book, but it's not a horrible one either. Markert has some sense of story structure, and some sense of people.