This
novel opens with a
pilot on an international flight, near morning. He is contemplating starting a lustful relationship with the sweet young stewardess. All of a sudden, people have disappeared -- an older woman''s husband, all the children and babies on board, and many others. Their clothes are neatly folded, including rings and other personal things, and they are JUST GONE! The pilot is told to return to the airport in Chicago. On the ground, there is chaos. People have disappeared from cars while they were driving -- there are accidents everywhere. Many emergency personnel have disappeared. People''s families have disappeared. (His copilot commits suicide.) The pilot gets a ride home and finds his devoutly Christian
wife and their young son gone. His daughter Chloe, in college in California, makes her way home. He is convinced it is THE RAPTURE, where Jesus takes his people and the innocents to Heaven to save them from the tribulations to come. Many people are thinking of other explanations (aliens, foreign weapon testing, etc.), but the pilot knows what has happened, since his wife had warned him of it; he wonders if he (and his skeptical daughter) can be saved still. He begins to go to his wife''s church, where another lukewarm sort-of Christian is
left behind, but organizes the people who are now converted and who begin coming to church in droves. The former pastor has left behind a tape of what has happened, and what to do if the holy and innocent people have disappeared one day.
This novel follows the lives of a number of other people as well, and some of the people in their lives, including a brilliant young journalist named Buck and some of the people he has covered in his journalistic stories. There is, for instance, an Israeli biochemist who invented chemicals that make the desert bloom. Israel is subjected to a potentially totally destructive attack from Russia, without warning -- but the Russian planes are downed by hail and fire in the sky -- no one on the ground is hurt, but the attacking force is totally destroyed. A charismatic young Rumanian has begun a meteoric, and some say ruthless and brutal, rise to power; this
book details the beginning of his career, the extent of his power over others, his attractiveness and seeming reasonableness and his utter ruthlessness behind the scenes. In the end, Buck hooks up with the pilot''s daughter, and he, the pilot, the daughter and their preacher form the Tribulation Force in order to resist the Antichrist and his New World Order.
While this book is obviously not prophetic, but speculative,
fiction (the technology, for one thing, is too out-of-date), it is a fascinating study in WHAT-IF. What if the Rapture were true and
happened this way and happened in the present day? It is an interesting study in human nature, and one comes to care very much about the characters in the story. While one cares enough to want to know what happens next, yet (especially if one has read the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament and Revelation in the New Testament) one dreads what is to come for them -- their defeat, and yet their victory. It is realistic, from a writing novelist''s point of view, as a news report or journal. The characters are lively and the story well-told.
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