Left behind

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 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.