Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58836 in Books
• Published on: 1998-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Synopsis
After millions of people around the world vanish in one moment, in what many claim to be the Rapture, Rayford Steele begins a search for the truth amidst global chaos.

Customer Reviews

Ayn Rand and Dan Brown do the rapture
I brought this book for 50p expecting a ridiculous plot, wooden characters, and terrible philosophy.

The book exceeded my expectations. My only complaint concerns the lack of bad sex scenes.

The penultimate scene involves the anti-Christ gratuitously shooting someone in the head, while brainwashing an entire room of highly influential politicians, as our hero prays for his soul in the corner of the room. The anti-Christ concludes this by hitting on an air hostess, but no black mass/satanic orgy results.

While I respect the authors for recognizing that whatever goes on between the beast from the pit and this air hostess is their own business, I do hope this deficit will be corrected in the later books.

I recommend this book to all connoisseurs of the genre.

Great idea. Great exploitation.
I picked up this book when it first came out in the UK in 2000. The premise was exciting and promised a lot. However after skipping merrily through the pages I realised it was basically a lot of vacuous nonsense. The standard of literature was poor and sometimes the prose simply made me cringe.

The fact this has sold millions in the US is no surprise. This is just another crude bit of exploitation of evangelical America by a few individuals who can write rubbish and make alot of money out of it. Was I tempted to buy anymore of their books (I would have been parted with the best part of a 100 pounds if I'd bought the rest of series)? Surpringly, no.

Boring, pedestrian, reactionary, prejudiced
Well, it's not unreadable. The writing is plodding and pedestrian, and the characterisation wooden and stereotypical, but many popular writers are successful in the same way. These guys are in about the same category as Jeffrey Archer, David Gemmell, etc. They write to tell a story, and rely on their readers' wish to find out what will happen next to carry them along.

The story in this case, of course, is of the Rapture, and of the End Times.

Our hero is tough, manly, loves his daughter, lusts after flight attendants but doesn't act on it, gets angry in a suitable kind of way, and is your basic authorial projection fantasy. His daughter is pretty, independent, clever, but not too clever and clearly not considered an equal to any male character. Other sympathetic characters are all men standing by themselves, bucking the system, and generally similar to our protagonist.

Lots of reactionary positions on everything, and of course lots of paranoia, are both implicit in the basic plot of 'United Nations takes over the world'. Some Jews are good, repent and become Christians, and other Jews are not and are part of the New World Order. Etc.

Non-believers are proud, arrogant, thoughtless, deliberately blinding themselves to the truth, and so on. Some are actively malevolent, or just petty.

Believers are persecuted and misunderstood (one example of persecution is that non-believers are not happy to be preached at all the time). They are constantly the underdog, but consistently successful despite that.

There are several tearful conversion scenes, and gifts of the spirit are real and protect a hero from hypnotic control by the Antichrist.

I'm not surprised the books sell well in the US - they allow Fundies to feel smug, humble, persecuted and successful all at the same time.

But I shouldn't sneer. I was reading the 80s/90s equivalent of this stuff (This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness by Frank Peretti) when I was a teenager, and I believed every word. Luckily I've moved on since then...