Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind
In this allegedly secular age of ours, where the fantasy genre begets bestselling novels on vampires, zombies, wizards, and their ilk, how likely would it be to produce a massive bestseller on a strictly Christian subject? Say you’re a literary agent and someone sends a query letter about a book on the end of days: Christians around the world vanish, and nonbelievers are left to rummage through the chaos. Well, if you turned it down back in the early nineties, your gums would be numb now from biting your elbows. Because that’s the novel Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins wrote as Left Behind (Wheaton, Illinois, 1995; 468 pp.), and the series that novel spawned had sold 40,000,000 copies by 2001. No, that’s not a typo (it’s up to 63 million now). I’ve said that this year I’ll write about bestselling novels, so here’s another one. The story follows Rayford Steele, an airplane pilot, and Cameron (“Buck”) Williams, a prestigious journalist, as each of them deals with the consequences o...