Most people do now know that I have read 7 of the 13 Left Behind books (12 actually, but then they threw on that extra one, and this is not counting the prequels, the kids versions and the horrendous graphic novels: Armageddon can pay off nicely as long as it's delayed). I don't hide the fact, it just doesn't come up that often. I would have read all of them, but when I went through my Left Behind phase these were the only ones out. The phase lasted I think 2 weeks. The books read quickly. Why?Originally I wanted to read something I knew going into the book that it would be shit. I do this from time to time. I also wanted to read what AMERICA was reading, and right around the time I read this there was a good deal of media coverage on the Left Behind phenomena. I felt disconnected from AMERICA at the time, as I was at Grad School and spent most of my time around then reading Adorno, Deleuze and Levinas. Most of AMERICA wasn't reading this, but they were reading LaHaye and Jenkins tales of a post-rapture world. Once I started reading the first one I got hooked on them, and read all of them that I could. Were they any good? No. They are terrible books. Awful. The writing is shit, their dialog is painfully cookie cutter and except for Rayford every character sounds exactly the same. These two murders of Literature also found it too time consuming to put things like, 'Rayford said', or 'Buck said' after a line of dialog so to follow a conversation again and again I found myself having to count back lines to see who was talking when. That most of their dialog was made up of short declarative sentences made this even more painful (I don't know why but it did). The plot.All the born again christians goto heaven when the rapture happens. The non-believers are all left for the 7 years of tribulation. Everyone gets one more shot to believe in the big G and JC, because they are kind that way. The anti-JC and satan though are out to make life a living hell for these new found believers. Apparently there was a video game that came out, where the Tribulation Force (what a fucking stupid name) got to fight the minions of satan. It looked like a Grand Theft Auto kind of game, and apparently you could kill the evil-doers. Neat, huh?Did this make me a believer?No. What did I learn from these books?That once again outlandish persecution fantasies dominate the thinking of groups of people. This isn't news, but at the time I was drawing interesting parallels between left-wing theorists like Ernesto Laclau, left-wing theorists like Judith Butler, racist writers like George Lincoln Rockwell, and these two bozos. All of them based their entire philosophy basically on the opposition where they precieved themselves to be a minority being threatened, and basically stuck on the idea of us vs. them as a starting point. All three types of people went in divergent directions with their theorizing, but they all seem to revel in being victims. The Republican Party, and right-wing talk show hosts pass almost their entire identity these days on this kind of thought. You'd think that they were being hunted down and killed by raving liberals, instead of living in a country where their brand of thought is pretty much accepted (I'll avoid going off on my thoughts on our two-party system here). Liberals probably kind of do this too, but they at least have the decency to hide their paranoia by attempting to do something that isn't just whining about how they are being victimized (they might point to someone like a tortured prisoner, or the poor to show how bad things are under some conservative. This is going way off track. This book is pop-shit. Sadly this is a mainstream type of thought in this country, a non-thinking brand of religious mania being fed to people through shitty books like this one. Instead of believing in anything this book is getting people to do the old Pascal's wager and put the insurance bet on getting into Heaven, there is nothing here about being any kind of decent human being, just a mindless automaton getting ready to kneel down and pray and preach at anyone until they are brow-beaten into submission. Why three stars? Because they were just so much fun to read in their terribleness, I'll always be a sucker for the rapture stuff christians produce. Good shit.
It would be unfortunate enough were the prose this book's lone problem. But as knuckle-headedly indelicate (Jenkins describing Carpathia as "not unlike a young Robert Redford" on 114 and later Jenkins's character describing Carpathia as "a young Robert Redford" on 232) and heavy-handed ("you might be asking Carpathia to turn against his own angels" on 231) and weirdly unfunny when attempting to be funny (the entire flirtatious cookie exchange between Buck and Chloe: 365-367 and 372-375) and cringingly pedestrian ("He knew Hattie was not a bad person. In fact, she was nice and friendly" on 89) as the prose is, the book suffers most, perhaps, from its shameless pushing of agendas amidst token attempts to convince the reader that pushing agendas couldn't be further from its intent. At one point in the novel, we learn that Buck had always thought "born-again" to be synonymic with "ultraright-winger" - Jenkins seems to be telling us, in this instance, that such isn't the case, that the two are distinct ideological phenomena or positions. And yet, earlier in the novel, Jenkins forces a disgusting critique of the pro-choice perspective into the narrative, suggesting that doctors and counselors who work in abortion clinics cannot but long for women to decide to abort their babies. The novel is explicit that we needn't subscribe to ultra-conservative ideology in order to be Christians even as it implies that ultra-conservative ideology and Christianity are inextricable bedfellows. (Another example of the novel containing this contradiction can be seen in its sympathy with "stand[ing] up [...] to bigotry" on 429 alongside its subtle bigoted dig at homosexuals on 103: "[Rayford Jr] wasn't effeminate, but Rayford had worried that he might be a mama's boy...")It's just a thudding collapse devoid of imagination, this novel. The characters are cardboard cut-outs. There are flashes of bizarre homoerotic subtext, from the naming of characters (Buck, Rayford Steele, Dirk, Steve Plank) to double entendric prose (e.g. "to stoop to something as tawdry as paying for sex. Had Irene known how hard he was..." on 144, "and the milk making him long for his boy. This was going to be hard, so hard" on 101, "Dirk and Buck had become closer than ever, and it wasn't unusual for Buck to visit London on short notice. If Dirk had a serious lead, Buck packed and went. His trips had often turned into excursions into countries and climates that surprised him, thus he had packed the emergency gear" on 86-87). In the end, the story is little more than a stencil clumsily cut to fit a rigid (and therefore uninspired) reading of Revelation.I'll be taking breaks between books for the duration of the series, lest I develop a need for antidepressants, or a vomit bag (thanks to gooeyness of the burgeoning relationship between Buck and Chloe). (I'm reading them in research.) There must be better fiction than this coming out of the Christian publishing houses?*page numbers in this review are from the hardcover edition...
What do You think about Left Behind (2000)?
I really tried to like these books. I actually forced myself to read 6-1/2 of them before I finally gave up in disgust. They are just so badly written as to be unreadable. It's not the subject matter. It's the handling. The characters aren't even two-dimensional. The plots are so implausible that I found myself groaning out loud many times. These guys really REALLY needed to hire a ghost writer!!! Avoid at all costs. If you are like me and kept hoping the books would get better as the series progressed, I'll save you a lot of time. They don't. I can count on one hand the number of times I've started to read a book and just couldn't finish it. Book Seven of this series was one of them.
—Bill
One of my managers at work actually reccomended this book to me after I told I had read 'The Road'. I have to admit that I was skeptical going into this book only because I knew some of the background due to publicity surrounding the movies. I didn't feel much like reading a bunch of quoted Bible scripture - but I was happy to discover that there wasn't much of that in the book.The story focuses primarily around a core group of characters all tied together following a mysterious worldwide disappearance of people. Each goes down there own path - and some find God while other are put under the spell of the anti-Christ. The beginning of the story was really riveting and had me hooked. SO many questions presented right away - and even though I knew the eventual answer the authors did a great job of present opposing and varied theories regarding the dissapearances. I wish I had more time to just sit down and read this book all at once but it got spaced out over about 2 weeks. The middle of the story had a bit of filler but the end of the book sucked me back in and left me wanting more. I have the second book on loan from my manager and I am going to try and squeeze it all in before I start my list of 100 Must Read Books. First book up - 'Slaughterhouse 5'.
—Terence
I'll use this one review for all the books of this series I've read (just to save time)and that's inclusive of 1-10. I truly enjoyed them, some a little more than others, but that's probably more of a reaction to my over indulgence than anything on the authors part (I was averaging three or four a week around school, yeah too much, kind of like a kid having too much candy and getting ill) These books are creative, action packed, display the gospel credibly and made me care about the characters. The plot is based on a specific end times view (I forget which one, to be honest when I was reading them I wasn't to interested I just wanted to keep up with what was going on in the story) It has a lot of characters and as the books progress it can get a bit confusing for some people to keep tabs on who, where, what and all that jazz. If you like ridiculously long series, Biblical perspectives and a fun cast of characters these are definitely for you! (just pace yourself, and don't repeat my mistake. Just because they are all in print doesn't mean they need to be read in the same month!)
—Rachel
