The End of Left Behind Fridays

Well, there were those who doubted he'd do it, but he got through it. Fred has wrapped up his massive review / critique / deconstruction of LaHaye & Jenkins' Left Behind. Chapter by chapter, sometimes page by page, occasionally paragraph by paragraph, this devout Christian has dissected this book and shared with us why it's so very bad.

Left Behind fails as a novel for many, many reasons, but all of its other faults -- the odious lack of empathy it holds up as a moral example, its blasphemous celebration of self-centeredness masquerading as Christianity, its perverse misogyny, its plodding pace, its wooden dialogue, it fetishistic obsession with telephones, its nonexistent characterization, its use and misuse of cliches, its irrelevant tangents, deplorable politics, confused theology, unintentional hilarities, hideous sentences, contempt for craft, factual mistakes, continuity errors ... its squandering of every interesting premise and its overwhelming, relentless and mind-numbing dullness -- all of these seem to be failures of the sort that one might encounter in any other Very, Very Bad book hastily foisted off onto the public without a second glance.**

Any one of those faults, on its own, would have been enough to earn Left Behind a place on the Worst Books of 1995 list. The presence of all of those faults -- in a single book and in such concentrated form -- is more than enough to secure its place on a list of the Worst Books of All Time.

Yet the book's signature failure is something far simpler. Left Behind disproves the very thing it sets out to prove. It presents an inadvertent but irrefutable case for the unreality and impossibility of all of the events that Tim LaHaye claims are prophesied to occur at any moment.

Those events are not about to occur. They never will occur. They never can occur. Don't believe me? Go read Left Behind and see for yourself.

That signature failure, Left Behind's forceful refutation of itself, is what earns this book my vote as the Worst Book of All Time.

** The ellipsis there is an invitation to help fill in the blanks. A comprehensive list of all of this books faults is probably not possible, but we can try.

This is a link to Slacktivist's Left Behind Archives - a massive, multi-year effort of weekly posts. It's excellent.

ps - Fred's promised to tackle the movie next, so it's not really the end.