Left Behind [The Trilogy] : Any Good?

[ssampier]

Sounds ripe for a parody or spoof. Any decent ones out there?

 

[Remus Lupin]

Well, it doesn't count as a spoof, but reading Slacktivist is great satire. There's also some Slacktivist inspired fan fiction out there, trying to write LaHaye and Jenkins' world better than they have.

 

[Jasperak]

Em, yeah, religion rules os I won't comment on Left Behind as it would be all bad

The Stand, yup, awesoem book, end is a tad odd.

A great "apocalypse" book is "Nightworld" by the author who did "The Keep", and part of that story arc.
Hm, htink vampires meet Cthulhu meets Armageddon. Very good, very scary, and gruesome bits..."No, not Daddy's eyes!"....omg, *barf!*

"Repairman Jack" is one of my fave characters, and he's in that story.

Are you thinking of F. Paul Wilson's The Keep, Reborn, and Reprisal?

 

[Tetsubo]

More to the point, Jenkins clearly wants us to believe that "Buck" is brave and incorruptible. It isn't just that "Buck" is deluding himself about being a great crusading pure-as-the-driven-snow hard hitting reporter - Jenkins expects us to believe that he is, because he tells us this is so, over and over.

Buck is also a thirty year old virgin. For no real reason other than so he can be pure and chaste so he can court the other Mary Sue character's (LeHaye's porn star named "Captain Rayford Steele") much younger daughter Chloe. But, he is also supposed to be a worldly been through the hard knocks kind of guy, once again, because we are told so.

I won't even go into the WWF scene where he wrestles with another "investigative reporter" over who gets to interview the next Secretary-General of the UN.

Wow. That sounds far worse then I would have expected.

 

[Remus Lupin]

Really, the thing about Left Behind is, that it is literally impossible to overstate how bad it is. And again, this has nothing to do with religion. It's just the Worst Written Book in the History of Literature (with the possible exceptions of its own sequels).

I thank God every day that Slacktivist is sacrificing his time and sanity to read it so that the rest of us don't have to.

 

[Mallus]

Sounds ripe for a parody or spoof.

Writing that bad is actually difficult, if not impossible, to parody. How do make it any more ludicrous, less insightful, or less competent?

 

[Angel Tarragon]

Which is it that bothers you? The children/babies disappearing or that it doesn't bother anyone?

The fact that it doesn't bother anyone. If I were a parent I'm pretty sure I'd be horrified.

 

[Remus Lupin]

The fact that it doesn't bother anyone. If I were a parent I'm pretty sure I'd be horrified.

It's interesting to compare the reaction to a childless world in Left Behind to the reaction to the same phenomenon in "Children of Men."

 

[Rackhir]

It's interesting to compare the reaction to a childless world in Left Behind to the reaction to the same phenomenon in "Children of Men."

This actually does get covered. Sorta. Kinda. In a typically LaHaye and Jenkin's fashion.

http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2007/04/lb_why_doctors_.html

BTW this is the link for the Slacktivist crowd's "Fan Fic" section.

http://exharpazo.blogspot.com/

 

[Storm Raven]

The fact that it doesn't bother anyone. If I were a parent I'm pretty sure I'd be horrified.

The thing that makes it make even less sense in the book is that the population of the world (with the exception of the clever main characters who know what is happening because they have, by author fiat, chosen to believe the correct mish-mash of end times prophecy) doesn't know what caused the disappearances.

We (the readers) know that the children (and everyone who was "worthy") have been raptured and taken to heaven, because we can read the book jacket. But in the book, no one knows what happened to them - which is the story that "Buck" is supposedly investigating at a leisurely pace so that Global Weekly can get a story out "in three weeks or so" (imagine that 2 billion people suddenly vanished, and Time decided it would be worth a cover story about a month later).

Theories are handed about - aliens took them, electromagnetic feedback from too many technological devices and nuclear power vaporized them, and so on. So, most of the world (except our heroes, who know "the truth", but aren't bothering to tell anyone, because that would be unChristian of them or something) thinks that their children and other loved ones are dead. Or abducted by aliens. But no one seems to care. At all.

And not telling people news doesn't seem to be an exclusive feature of the virtuous heroes - several times the editors of Global Weekly sit on a story that, if it actually happened, would normally be huge and splashed across the cover of every newspaper and magazine in the world. Like, say, we have solid evidence that the wealthiest banker in the world and the President of Romania (and soon to be secretary-General of the UN, which somehow leads him to being World Dictator too) have conspired to kill several people, including a London policeman.

Really, the book makes no sense. I think a decent book could be made using the same subject matter. These books are not even worth the paper they are printed on.