~The bad, the bargains, and the just plain bizarre.
It’s been a little while since I did the first “Bargain Book Reviews,” and not because of any head exploding reason. The last book turned out to be around average at best, with nothing to really make fun of. I decided it was a shameful prospect, and had to dig a little deeper this time, find something I knew that could redeem me.
And you’ll pardon the redeem pun, because today’s book is “Left Behind.” I picked this up back in November of last year at a library book sale for about 50 cents. I wanted to get through a bunch of legitimate books on my reading list, however, and so here we are now.
The premise of this book is extremely simple; all the good Christians and children of the world get LEFT BEHIND. Hurr durr. It starts with a pilot, Rayford Steele, flying a plane when suddenly people disappear in mid-flight. The world falls into chaos for a bit, blah blah blah, he gets home and finds his Christian wife spirited away. His sin? Lusting after (but never acting upon) a flight attendant.
Oops. So there I’ve went to hell once. But it gets better, because I go to hell THREE TIMES in first five pages. Lusting, repelled by religion, and arrogance because the pilot thought he was “brighter . . . more intelligent” than someone that blindly followed the J-man. So I’m going to Super-Hell.
Anyways, the rest of the book switches back and forth between Rayford coming to Christ, deciding his sinner daughter should join the church, and the viewpoint of a journalist named “Buck” Williams. Also, the flight attendant Rayford lusted after is totally set up to be Nicolae Carpathia’s (a.k.a. SATAN, THE MASTER OF ABORTIONS) harlot.
At one point it talks about Buck going to Israel and talking with Chaim Rosenzwig. And here I need to pause for a second.
Chaim Rosenzwig. That name is probably the most stereotypical thing I've ever read.
Anyways, this Jew scientist comes up with some magic formula that makes deserts arable land; the Russians attack Israel, but for whatever reason God steps in, destroys all he Russian jets, and gives his best troll face, because later in the book it states 144,000 Jews will convert to Christianity and be saved.
So God is all for free will, as long as it’s exclusive to the first few thousand. It’s like he runs those late-night infomercials. “CALL NOW FOR THIS EXCLUSIVE OFFER OF SALVATION, BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! FREE SHAMWOW, BITCHES!”
Or something like that. Anyways, there’s definitely some bat-shit crazy ideas floating around in this book. As I understand it, the following will happen:
The devil will bring peace to the world but because of his “unrevealed motives” the new Christians will fight him. So really it’s the Christians bringing about violence and murder and all that... Kinda like the Crusades. So really they didn’t learn a goddamn (oops, I’m going to hell again) thing. So the Christians are teh aggressors, which are gonna force more people to take sides with the devil... because he’s trying to bring world peace. That’s like when you go bowling, throw your opponent the ball, and let them hit a grand slam. And I’d hit a grand slam too, because it’s close but not the equivalent of the all star special, which has a waffle and costs a couple bucks less. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, in this post-rapture world, I’m siding with whoever has waffle house.
And it can get very preachy at times. I know a lot of the religious people I know who’ve read the book say it isn’t at all, but I do have a brief argument for that. For you guys and gals, it’s your way of life. That’s what you’re instructed to do, think, and work with. For the rest of us, however, most mentions of God is typically like shining light on a cockroach, or tossing water on a gremlin. It’s cute at first, but then we mutate into the demonic little creatures you thought we were.
And what’s in this book isn’t even at times like the “tolerable” preachiness, where non-Christians just brush it off. This is like the typical fanatical Jesus fanboy:
To quote, WORD FOR WORD from the book: “If Chloe wants to laugh or run the other way, I’M GOING TO FORCE HER TO MAKE A DECISION.” from page 345 of my paperback copy. It’s like that all throughout. At one point Rayford wants to “sic a preacher on his daughter” so she’ll come to Christ. Wait, what?
Later, the born-again christian Rayford Steele guilts a sinner into a meeting with him. Because if there’s one thing Christians are good at, it’s guilting people to God. The J-man preached that sort of thing all the time, didn’t he? No? Oh. Someone should’ve been paying more attention in Sunday School, in between rounds of soddomizing the alter boys. Which, speaking of Catholics, there’s a single line saying the Pope got raptured, so Mary, I guess you were right after all. The rest of everyone I know, well, I guess we could have a hell of a party.
Finally, late in the book, Rayford’s daughter Chloe converts: It just goes to show that if you push hard enough, sound sincere and urgent enough, God will listen to your prayers and convert the sinner.
This is a very fundamentalist, literal reading of the Bible and prophecy surrounding it. There’s only two women characters, and I’m surprised they made it out of the kitchen long enough to realize a Rapture happened. In typical “grumpy old Christian man fashion,” all the women in this book are emotional, bitchy, complicated on purpose, harlots in need of saving.
There’s no shortage of going to hell for anyone in this book; aside from the three I hit in the first five pages, I got singled out for being a deist. It also kinda drones on about how college could be bad, because one of the characters gets resented by his mostly Christian (and thus Raptured) family for going to college (see page 107).
Also, being Robert Redford is a sin, because that’s how the devil looks. And a character named “Steve” essentially becomes the right hand man of the devil. Being a person that at least 30 percent of those I know refer to as “Steve,” I felt God was saying HEY THAT COULD BE YOU. Excuse me while I go pray.
I’d love to see a non-Christian author write something like this, though, because I think it could be done so much better. There could easily be a lot of character development and emotion with the strife of losing loved ones, finding your faith was wrong, etc. etc. Hell, even the language in this book was laughable; the President of the United States of America was pretty much a hick in how he talked and the degree of professionalism you’d expect from politicians, journalists, or broadcasters was completely absent. I can almost imagine the fundamental author hovering over his keyboard, arguing with himself about how edgy writing “heckuva” or “pimp” or “sexiest” would be. I can certainly envision my psycho-religious aunt reading those words in print and tossing the book down as garbage. That’s the kind of audience that’s going to be buying this up.
All of that being said, I didn’t think this was a God-awful book until probably the last 100 pages or so, when it gets all-out preachy. I’d just come off of reading Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy,” and to provide some background on that, the author was actually a prominent journalist that knew what he was talking about. So it was kinda funny to watch LaHaye and Jenkins stumble through their rudimentary knowledge of the journalistic process, and how they probably sat on Wikipedia gathering info on the United Nations and government in general. The last criticism I really have is the view on technology; this is supposed to be in the near future, yet people are still using video tapes (come on, DVD’s are starting to be a thing of the past) and using modems. Like, dial-up modems for internet. Uhhhh.
But like I said; not horrible until the last 100 pages. It’s certainly a “popcorn book,” so to speak, where you read it for a distraction or to kill some time, but knowing you won’t come away with anything great or groundbreaking. It certainly IS NOT the worst thing I’ve read this year (a pair of novels by Kevin J. Anderson and the first two books of the Sword of Shannara take that award), but it’s not the best either. There’s certainly a market for these kinds of books, and the authors know that; they hit their target audience, a member of which I simply am not.
Final grade: 5/10 (average at best, until the Rapture actually happens, and I wish I’d listened. In which case, I’ll go to the library and use these as a kind of “zombie survival guide,” except I guess it’d be a “Jesus Survival Guide.)
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