Story was interesting. Writing was not great. Very repetitive and annoyingly laden w/platitudes and religious holiness. It wasn't I suppose meant to be objective, but was cloyingly subjective. Everyone was either extremely loving and wonderful or misguided but not without hopeful redemption. ( )

Most have met controlling people, we see them everywhere, and they often lose all sight of reality as they are willing to go to any lengths to have their way and protect their power. This man is awful, but so true to type.

Unfortunately, we see more of this each day in our current America, but this evil man is just too evil and horrible for words. Read this four years ago and his evilness is unforgettable - especially as he hides within a church.

Rebecca never felt safe as a child. In 1969, her father, Robert Nichols, moved to Sellerstown, North Carolina, to serve as a pastor. There he found a small community eager to welcome him - with one exception. Glaring at him from pew number seven was a man obsessed with controlling the church. Determined to get rid of anyone who stood in his way, he unleashed a plan of terror that was more devastating and violent than the Nichols family could have ever imagined. Refusing to be driven away by acts of intimidation, Rebecca's father stood his ground until one night when an armed man walked into the familys kitchen...and Rebecca's life was shattered.

If anyone had a reason to harbor hatred and seek personal revenge, it would be Rebecca. Yet The Devil in Pew Number Seven tells a different story. It is the amazing true saga of relentless persecution, one family's faith and courage in the face of it, and a daughter whose parents taught her the power of forgiveness. ( )

This is a true story of how the author and her family were terrorized during the 1970s. As you go through the book, you will read of one horror after another - thinking it can't get any worse - but it does. It all begins in Sellerstown, NC. Pastor Nichols and his wife move to Sellerstown to pastor a local church. It is there that they meet up with the most powerful man in the community - Mr. Watts. H.J. Watts has a stranglehold on everything including the church. The battle begins when Pastor Nichols makes changes that strip H.J. Watts of his power over the church. It is a disturbing book, yet it delivers a powerful message of forgiveness with a pleasantly surprising ending. (Keep a Kleenex box close by.) ( )

It wasn't what I thought it was going to be like - but it did take place in eastern NC ... ( )

The title had put me off this book but I decided to read it in the end. Labeling someone as "the Devil" may help to sell books/catch a readers eye but i'm not sure that it's justifiable especially in light of what subsequently happens in this book.

The author relays events beginning when she wasn't even born. She uses journals/diaries and later records her own memories. Her Christian parents move to a small town for her father to take up a pastoral position in a church. On arrival, however, they find that the church is essentially controlled by one man who isn't actually even a member. He uses his connections in high places and money to dominate the church scene and later (according to the author) pursues a relentless campaign of harassment against the Pastor and his family in an attempt to "run them out of town."

Later in the story a further incident occurs involving another man from the community resulting in the death of several people. These incidents seem to be only tentatively linked but are clearly traumatic for the author.

I found the writing style difficult. The author goes into a lot of detail about her childhood and other events in her life that didn't have any bearing on the main events of the book. Having worked in law enforcement I found some of the events described hard to believe from a criminal justice perspective; the frequent use of dynamite to blow up various items in the vicinity of the author's house seemingly with no real efforts by the perpetrator to cover his tracks/hide what he was doing. Surely this is a serious failure by the police as the offender was known to all and also living in the community!? This serious harassment continued on and off for years including one event where shots were fired INTO the victim's house narrowly missing various people living there. It all seeemed a bit unlikely and also that the other side of the story needed to be told.

I was saddened to read of latter events; the serious decline in the mental health of the Pastor. But I wasn't surprised after all that had been endured.

I wondered at the end of this book what the purpose was in writing it. The author details her faith in Jesus and her parents also seemed to have a strong faith throughout. There are several chapters at the end on the subject of forgiveness in relation to what had happened.

Maybe this felt disjointed as it was written from the perspective of the author as a child. I don't think the publicity the author and her family received in recent years necessarily helped her. I'm not sure what to think about this book other than to say that I don't agree with the title. Probably the best word for the series of events as described by the author is "odd." There was a scene where her dead mother appears to one of the perpetrators in a vision to offer forgiveness, the author comments that this is just like her mother to do something like that...i would question the authenticity of that account.

The book is fairly clean; free of bad language and sexual content but there is obviously a lot of violence. ( )