And the Guf was empty

 For reason I still can't quite fathom, I decided to at least attempt to reread Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind series, which unsurprisingly starts with Left Behind. (As a note, I read the series back when I first moved to Columbus in 2001, found the entire thing [mostly] at a used book sale, and decided to grab it, since it cost roughly $2.) Well, gee, let's start unpacking this.

We open with Rayford, Pan Continental pilot, flying New York to London. He's contemplating putting the moves on his lead flight attendant, Hattie. Well, problem being quite a few people on the plane vanish into thin air, leaving their clothing, implants, fillings, etc behind. One the flight also is Buck, reporter wunderkind for a weekly news magazine. Buck had been in Israel a few months earlier and watched as Russia bombed it, but through a miracle, no damage was done. 

So, Rayford finds his wife and son have vanished, but his daughter in San Jose is still there. Buck goes to Chicago, then does manage to get to London, where one of his sources blows up in a car bomb.

Rayford reaches out to the church his wife attended, and learns that this was The RAPTURE, and he missed being taken to heaven by Jesus, and must now become a Christian to make it to heaven 7 years hence after the world more of less gets destroyed. He works on bringing daughter Chloe into the fold, Hattie and Buck as well. In the mean time, a rising political star out of Romania ascends to the presidency of his country, then takes over the United Nations by the end of this book. That would be Nicolae Carpathia. By the end, Buck, Rayford, and Chloe join Pastor Bruce in forming the Tribulation Force, trying to survive the upcoming seven years of Tribulation. Hattie has become Nicolae's personal assistant. 

Now then. Anyone who's read this objectively will testify that the prose is horrible. That becomes fairly obvious after a chapter or two. The dialogue is stilted, and the world seems to recover from the disappearances a heck of a lot more quickly that one would imagine. Depending on how one reads The Book of Revelation, the Antichrist is the first seal broken, so his appearance isn't a great surprise. (I always through it was War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, but some translations lump War and Pestilence into one horseman. Neither here nor there. Given the series needs a villain, Carpathia steps up fairly easily.) We also get the "Two Witnesses" (Eli and Moshe) quite a bit earlier than the book this is supposedly coming out of places them. Here, they show up about 2/3 of the way through book one. In Revelation, they show up in Chapter 11 after the 6th trumpet. Again, not my concern. I'm not a biblical scholar by any means. Then again, as I understand it, the entire Rapture scenario isn't actually in Revelation, and instead comes from Paul's letters, and given there are entire non fiction books dedicated to arguing when exactly in the end of the world its supposed to happen, I can only roll my eyes and think of the scene in Life of Brian when everyone picks up his holy relics to make everyone else worship. Or the whole thing about how Carpathia resembles an original Roman, blond and blue eyed. (Sweetie, that's Northern Europe.) Or the complete lack of poor people or people of color in this. Or the random conversation between Hattie and Rayford about how Abortion doctors need pregnant women to stay in business. (Seems the babbies and embryos and fetuses all got taken up with the children.) 

I mean, when I originally read this series, I was looking for insight into how certain segments of society I was interacting with thought. 20 some years on, after listening to dog whistles being blown through megaphones for several years, yeah. There are several in here, like ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT, ONE WORLD CURRENCY, PEOPLE WITH MONEY AND INFLUENCE DESTROYING EVERYTHING (ok, that last one is kind of true, but here, it's more George Soros is working for the Antichrist than Elon Musk is flooding a platform he bought with racism and fascism.)

I just can't wait to get into the later books again, where we get condescension to any belief that isn't either Orthodox Judaism that will accept Jesus by the final book  or Crispy Christianity, or some Dante-esque moments where people they don't agree with are shown to have failed to be good Christians and are therefore being Tribulated. Wee.