Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days

First sentence: Rayford Steele's mind was on a woman he had never touched.

When I was in my late teen years, there were two book series that were being talked about--Left Behind and Harry Potter. I was slow to read them both, though I did read the first books in both series around the same time--when I was in college. Both books I considered slow, slow, slow, super slow. I recently read the Harry Potter series and appreciated it for the most part (though it's not for everyone). I decided I'd give this series a go. Or at least attempt to do so.

The premise is simple: The rapture occurs in the first chapter of the book and everyone else has been....drumroll please....left behind. The story follows three or four main characters as they try show more to piece together what happened and why. Rayford Steele and Buck Williams are the two male leads of the story. (Chloe, Rayford's daughter, and Hattie, Rayford's flight attendant, round out the cast.) Rayford is almost certain right from the get go that it is the rapture, that this was a supernatural occurrence, that Christ has returned for the saints, that these are the last days. Everyone else takes more convincing---for the most part.

I am a Christian.
I am a Christian who genuinely believes in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
I believe the Bible to be the Word of God, inerrant, infallible, God-breathed--the whole works.

I mention all of the above so that you know where I am coming from in my review. I am not mocking the Bible. I am not mocking the second coming. I am not questioning the existence of God. I am not doubting God's promises.

But this book suffers from two or three issues.
1) The writing is bad especially in terms of characterization and dialogue. Nails on a chalkboard bad.
2) The writing comes across as cocky and condescending. I think this has to do with being a little too confident in their particular interpretation of the end times than perhaps anyone should be.
3) The book has an obvious point and becomes repetitive in trying to reiterate the point. Now the point itself--believe in Jesus Christ, repent of your sins, turn to him, have faith, all of it--none of these are bad points. But they don't make for the absolute best fiction. That is when you are crafting a novel, crafting characters and dialogue, it might be a good idea to go a little deeper and broader.

I can't say that the book is theologically awesome. Because while I am sure that Jesus Christ *is* returning, the way everything is laid out in the novel makes a lot of assumptions, presumptions, goes way above and beyond what can be clearly supported by Scripture. I am reminded of old cartoons where a character is running and happens to run off a cliff. The character keeps on running--on air itself--until that moment when they look down and there is nothing below.

I think it is easy to mock the writing--just read some reviews on GoodReads and the like--and somehow turn it into a mockery of the end times itself. Or to turn it into a mockery of those who do believe. But the two shouldn't have to be linked together. You can believe in God and also not enjoy a book.

I will say this in the book's defense. IF THE PACING OF THE LAST HUNDRED PAGES had been the pacing from the start, then the book might not be so bad. The book is just so incredibly dull until it isn't. show less

I decided to read this because the premise was intriguing and it was somewhat internet famous for being awful. I went into it with fairly low expectations, but not quite low enough.
I managed to get through the first 20 or so pages as I enjoyed arguing with every flawed plot point, and then was only able to slog through the rest of the book by imagining how I would have rewrite the novel if given the chance.
The writing is abysmal. The writers have evidently never heard the catchphrase of every writing teacher: "show not tell!" None of the main characters are physically described (aside from Rayford having grey hair) so are difficult to picture. Hattie is apparently physically attractive, but we are never given any further detail or show more evidence of this fact. Nor are the characters given any real conflict with God (with the possible exception of the pastor Brian, who does have an interesting story). For the main part, they just didn't believe enough for no good reason, missing a brilliant opportunity to show an interesting and moving reconciliation with faith. The supposedly incredible inspirational speeches by Nicolae Carpathia read like a bad high school essay copied from Wikipedia.
Then there's the sexism. For the most part, women appear only to scold or argue with the primary male characters and are then berated into submission (an actual approving quote from the book showed Chloe being "really put in her place" by the pastor Brian). I'm not surprised that both Rayford and Buck are portrayed as being bad with women, since the authors have apparently never met a real one. But they like trying to talk to you pointlessly, going to beauty parlours (result never described) and crying! And don't forget women react positively to being lectured and stalked.
Numerous logical flaws pepper the plot as well. In one particularly galling instance (which made me want to throw the book in the garbage) Hattie complains that her sister has been put out of a job due to abortions no longer being required. Putting aside the ridiculous notion of family planning clinics as businesses, the clinic she works for explicitly also provides pregnancy related counselling, and with every unborn fetus in the world having been raptured, I can only imagine how overrun their crisis counselling services would be!
In all, I am baffled at the book's popularity, and astonished that there was even one sequel, let alone a whole series. Oh well, they couldn't possibly go 12 books without eventually learning to write...right? show less

One fine day, just as the world is spinning on its sinning axis, a bunch of people disappear. Rather a lot, really. We're never given an exact number, but assuming it involves all the world's children, not just the blonde and blue-eyed True Christian children, that'd give you a figure of about 1.5-2 billion people. Now, our few remaining heroes must deal with the fallout of the most horrible disaster ever to strike humankind... that is, traffic jams, cliched newspaper editors, and the president of Romania giving endless boring speeches.

And no, it's not a comedy. At least its authors don't intend it to be one.

Now, there's a lot of things you can criticise Left Behind for without having to reach. You can call it preachy, long-winded and show more patronizing. You can say it has a vindictive "told ya!" streak as wide as the Red Sea. You can point out that it's about as biblically correct as Dan Brown, and twice as hung up on ridiculous conspiracy theories. You can say that it's blatantly reactionary, misogynist, xenophobic and anti-semitic. You can even, as some have done, claim that it's dangerous.

Or you can go the Oscar Wilde route and point out that Left Behind is simply a Very Badly Written book. A book so badly written that it actually works better as a parody of religious zealotry and close-minded nationalism, to the point where you might even find yourself cheering for the bad guys simply because the good guys are so utterly dim and unlikable, if not for the fact that LaHaye and Jenkins don't even manage to make the Antichrist an interesting villain - even though their entire plot hinges on his charisma.

See, Left Behind really wants to be a thriller. A rather horriffic thriller at that, a "scare 'em straight" kind of novel that hammers home the awful fate awaiting those who reject (the authors' brand of) Christianity when the end times hit. And it's not a bad idea, story-wise. God starting the apocalypse, 2 billion people disappearing, the big fight between good and evil... there should be a movie. But they forgot to bring horror and thrills to the party; instead, what they got was a boring, incoherent, poorly written mess, broken up by comedy when it falls apart into unintentional slapstick and parody, before sputtering out as if they ran out of paper in the middle of the story.

The trick to selling a supernatural (or otherwise non-realistic) premise is to make it plausible, make it relatable, and Left Behind has no idea how to do that since it feels absolutely nothing like the real world. The writers seem hilariously unaware of how anything works, unable to imagine how anyone who is not them would think about anything; it's like the "Kids say the darnedest things" of thrillers.

Daylight revealed the carnage and exposed Russia's secret alliance with Middle Eastern nations, primarily Ethiopia and Libya.

The main characters are obvious self-inserts, which makes it all the more disturbing that they are, for the most part, belligerent, self-serving, and incompetent. The secondary characters are all portrayed as either utter idiots or evil conspirators, since that's the only way they can ever hope to make the absurd plot work. The Antichrist being put in charge of the entire world because he's able to recite all the member nations of the UN (in alphabetical order in nine languages!) is just one of many examples where they seem to still be stuck in 3rd grade, where the definition of "smart" is "ability to parrot what others already know" - even though they get it wrong half the time. The writers don't understand their own concepts and so they just fib, which not only makes their characters look like morons, but makes me pretty sure the authors think I am one, too.

"Dr. Rosenzweig believes that some confluence of electromagnetism in the atmosphere, combined with as yet unknown or unexplained atomic ionization from the nuclear power and weaponry throughout the world, could have been ignited or triggered -- perhaps by a natural cause like lightning, or even by an intelligent life-form that discovered this possibility before we did -- and caused this instant action throughout the world. At this point they are postulating that certain people's levels of electricity made them more likely to be affected. That would account for all the children and babies and even fetal material that vanished. Their electromagnetism was not developed to the point where it could resist whatever happened."

Their... what?!? That's intended to be a believable explanation, btw. Yes, this is fiction and I'd be glad to give them a pass on factual errors if the characters and the plot held up. But it really really doesn't. It's incredibly clumsily written, breezing past what should be important events in a few sentences to get to the next overlong Bible summary, full of malplaced exposition that gets repeated so often you'd think they would notice how frequently they contradict themselves. Most of the novel focuses on characters trying to find out what happened, who's behind it, and what's going to happen next. But since the reader already knows exactly what's happened, we get a plot that's boring as hell and the only thing that keeps me turning the pages is to see what wacky concept the authors will try to sell me on next.

But above all, its failure is in completely missing its own point. The title is Left Behind; you'd think it would focus on the experience of being, well, left behind in the most horriffic disaster ever. The shock, the questions, the panic, the grief. Remember 9/11, or the Indian Ocean tsunami, or any major assassination or other huge disaster you may have been witness to in first or second hand? Remember the hushed shock afterwards? Remember the way every conversation would start with "Where were you when..."? Remember the outrage, the official mourning, the way it took weeks or even years to get back to something resembling normality?

Now imagine that multiplied by a few thousand times.

We never once get any sort of feeling for how the world at large – or even the US, which is really all the authors care about – is affected by this; at the most, billions of people disappearing and tens of thousands dying as a result is described as a logistical problem – it clogs up the roads, it makes landing aircraft difficult, you have to walk across Manhattan (which takes hours, apparently). You wanna do a horror novel about an apocalypse? The Last Man, War of the Worlds, The Stand, World War Z, On The Beach... I'm not saying they don't have their flaws, some more than others, but what they have in common is that they all give you some sort of angle on losing billions of people, bring you into the story, make you feel what it would be like, the pure shock it would be to humanity on both a personal and a societal level. What does Left Behind have? Clogged airport terminals. A couple of days later, the biggest news on the planet is that the president of Romania is speaking in the UN, which wouldn't be news ANYWHERE even in the middle of a severe news drought. All the world's children disappear, and nobody even raises an eyebrow except to weep a bit over their own kid before going on with their lives as if nothing happened.

In sports news, Major League Baseball teams in spring training face the daunting task of replacing the dozens of players lost in the cosmic disappearances.

Ultimately, LaHaye and Jenkins have neither the ability nor the interest to write about actual human beings living through trying times, what they are prepared to do to do the right thing under difficult circumstances, or what it means to be good or evil. They have a script that they cobbled together from a 2,000-year-old teacher's edition that everyone has already read, and rather than try to think up a plausible way of how it would play out in our times and what it would mean to people, they just do what many other bad fanfiction authors do and stick to the script no matter how badly it fits. Everything else be damned. Literally. show less

I'd been meaning to read this for a couple decades. I have mixed feelings on the theology - it might be right, it might be wrong, and I'm not going to be surprised either way in real life. But if you take the pre-trib rapture premise as reality, this felt like a reasonable scenario. I can't really critique on plot, pacing, character development, etc; I am not a literary crtiic. But I do strongly suspect that it wouldn't really hold up on those levels. It's more pop fiction.

But I what I do have a problem with is the missing character of Jesus. This is Christian fiction. It is supposed to all come back to Jesus. Not a general sense of spirituality. Not morality. Not even opposition to an antichrist. Nothing but the real and living person show more of Jesus. And He does not appear in this book in any meaningful capacity. Now let me clarify: I'm not expecting a character walking around named Jesus. He's presumably off-page sitting at the right hand of the Father. Showing up here would not make sense. But He should be present anyway. The Christian characters should know Him, love Him, be able to explain why they love Him, and be seeking His will. They don't. (With the notable exception of Rayford Steele's strong desire to share his zombification, uh, I mean Christian faith (in what exactly?), with his family and friends.)

This was most pronounced in the video that led Rayford to his conversion. A now-gone pastor had left a video explaining what was happening and encouraging people left behind to convert. It's a partial climax to the book, and is meant to explain all his questions, and, more than that, lead to a true conversion - that is for Rayford to decide to follow Jesus. In my copy, this takes eight pages. The religion of Christianity is clearly portrayed as recently vindicated to be right as there's a lot of talk about the connections between (the pastor's/authors' interpretation of) prophecy and the recent vanishings. There is occasional reference to "trust in Christ", talk of "God" trying to get the world's attention, or of accepting / receiving Chirst as your Savior, but none of these terms are defined or explained. These references are also very diffuse, only a couple paragraph's worth spread out over eight pages. In particular, Jesus' death on the cross and its connection to your need for Jesus is almost entirely missing. But the dangers of the coming antichrist are discussed at length. He actually gets more attention; how ironic. Rayford somehow knew the right magic words to put in the prayer anyway.

Basically, you could replace the Christianity in this book with your favorite race of aliens and a few True Believers in them, and you'd get the same book. In the words of the pastor from the video tape above, "perhaps you simply didn't take the time to examine the claims of [Jesus] for yourself". You should. This book won't help with it. Put it down and go find Jesus. May I suggest starting with the gospel of John. show less

I knew the book would be preachy, but the narrative became painfully obvious after 150 pages. The main character suddenly believes in God, the Bible, Jesus and the Rapture instantaneously. This after expousing his years and years of total disbelief. After his conversion, he speaks with a priest who wasn't taken (go figure) and just like that, literally within two sentences, he is 100% born again. His daughter Chloe, is skeptical and obviously is meant to be the voice of those who question all things religious.

The priest plays a tape from the pastor who was taken. The tape was made to explain to all who were left behind, just what happened and why. It is on this tape that the pastor warns all viewers of the arrival of the anti-Christ. show more Lo and behold, 35 pages later, as if on cue, he appears in the form of a Romanian president who is young, charismatic, very smart and who wins over the entire press and all world leaders while giving a speech at the UN. This happens around page 235.

It is at this point in the book that I knew exactly where this story was going, how it would end and how the next book in the series would be setup. And sure as snow is white, it turned out exactly as I predicted.

I was raised Catholic and was curious about the book. I was able to relate to the daughter, who spoke for all of the skeptics of the world. IMHO, like the Bible, this book is a work of fiction. And not very good fiction at that. The writing is geared towards junior high school readers and is very simplistic in structure, dialog and predictability. These problems, along with the fact that it preachers to the reader, I felt to be very demeaning. In short, the message is if you are not a believer, a Born-again Christian, you don't have a chance of getting into the Kingdom of Heaven. As Chloe says, "that's pretty sad for a loving God."

Books like this are not for me and I have no desire to read any of the other books in the series. show less

As far as I know, this series might well be the worst novels ever written. The Christian blogger Slacktivist has done a better job deconstructing them than I ever could. I got as far as the third in the series this time. They're just appalling not just in a theological or ethical way, but they also totally fail as airport pulp thrillers because they're supernaturally boring. In fact, the only way I could get as far as I did was to go back to 'Good Omens' (Gaiman/Pratchett) and imagine Aziraphale and Crowley as my shoulder angel and demon giving it the MST3K treatment with me. Even then, they got too drunk to be coherent and I fell asleep. I keep this series here out of pure train-wreck syndrome.

Also, all the male characters have show more gay-porn-star names, and normally, I'd like that, but they managed to make even THAT unappealing to me, which ain't easy. show less

I had never heard of this book, author or series until a friend reviewed it recently. I was curious, and saw that it was very popular so out of curiosity, I took a look.

It started out somewhat interesting, but quickly descended into situations that were not believable to me at all. I'm not a believer in the Bible, and I'm basically an atheist. I'm a skeptic, and I believe in scientific methods, so I don't believe anything I hear without some proof, especially when it came from a bunch of people from long ago that I know little about and can't question or even read their language. Perhaps for a Christian, the story might be more believable, and so more enjoyable because they believe it could happen.

I skimmed over a large part of the show more story after the first third or so, hoping something interesting would happen, but of course, it never did. God came, he saw, and he took whoever was gullible or too weak to resist, and left the rest to fight it out with the bad guys. I guess he was afraid his strong followers and children were too weak to stand up to fight, but I'm guessing some of the ones he left will carry the torch, so to speak.

I suppose some people will be able to read this as a fantasy story and perhaps enjoy it, but I think there are much better books available. This one is not that imaginative, seems to have a lot of typos, and the characters so far are just not that interesting. show less