The End Is Here, Pt. 6

By Walter Kirn

Things are not looking particularly good for the late great planet Earth. Things are looking very, very bad. Two hundred million demonic horsemen are galloping across the smoky skies, and a third of the world's people will be slain--a third of those who remain, that is, following the recent Christian Rapture, which has literally snatched believers from cars and offices and carried them off bodily to heaven. Among those left behind to battle evil as part of the rag-tag "Tribulation Force" are Rayford Steele, a former commercial-airline pilot, and Cameron ("Buck") Williams, publisher of the cyberjournal The Truth. Their enemy: one Nicolae Carpathia, former U.N. Secretary-General, current Global Community Potentate and--some believe--the Antichrist.

That's the narrative setup for Assassins, the sixth and latest installment in the startlingly popular Left Behind series by co-authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, two men who are doing for Christian fiction what John Grisham did for courtroom thrillers. Within three weeks of its publication, the apocalyptic action thriller was No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list--a list that generally doesn't even count sales by the nation's Christian bookstores. So wildly anticipated was Assassins among LaHaye and Jenkins' faithful fans that at midnight on the morning of its release, a line of nearly 1,000 buyers formed outside the Jesus Chapel Discount Bookstore in Scottsdale, Ariz. And at a speed even Satan's horsemen might envy, Assassins' publisher, Tyndale House, has decided to add 650,000 copies to its million-strong first printing.

Assassins' authors, whose end-times shoot-'em-ups have spawned a website and a movie deal and earned them millions of dollars, prefer to view their books' appeal in less secular terms. "People," says LaHaye, "are beginning to realize that something in this world is happening that has never happened before. The technology is going out of sight, one-world mania seems to be gripping the world." A self-described "prophecy scholar" and minister for more than 50 years, LaHaye, 73, concerns himself less with the books' prose than with their biblical underpinnings, turning ancient references to plagues and famines, wars and storms into crisp, modern plot points. "I prepare a 30-to-50-page proposal, with Scripture teachings," he says. "Then Jerry comes along. I make suggestions about characters, and Jerry puts them together into fiction."

Jenkins, 49, is also a man on a mission. "We've had many unsaved people say they have accepted Christ because of reading Left Behind or one of the other books." The author of 130 books, he cut his literary teeth writing as-told-to memoirs for pro athletes such as Nolan Ryan and Walter Payton. The Left Behind books are his passion, though. Of the Rapture and Second Coming, he says, "We believe it could happen today or it could happen a thousand years from now." He resists the notion that his novels exploit today's premillennial anxiety. "The books don't mention any date whatsoever. We're not talking about the millennium. We're not talking about Y2K."

Assassins, like its predecessors in the series, is set in the indefinite near future, and for all the story's cosmic import, the tone is curiously homey, if not slightly xenophobic. The fugitive all-American heroes of the Tribulation Force, linked by the Internet in their desperate battle against insidious Mr. Bigs, may as well be the reader's next-door neighbors. It's easy to picture them, pre-Apocalypse, eating their Wheaties, fertilizing their lawns and changing the oil in their Ford Explorers. As for the books' Jewish characters, most are converts to Christianity. And though the Force carries out its operations in South Africa, France and Israel, its headquarters is in Illinois.

Fighting Satan from tornado country makes for a strange fulfillment of prophecy but certainly an accessible one. The odd achievement of the Left Behind books is to render the unimaginable familiar--often absurdly so. Who ever imagined, for example, combatting the archfiend with handguns and encrypted e-mail? Still, fans are hooked. They can smell the sulfur, hear the hoofbeats. Kellie Tolson, 40, who directs a hospital child-care center in Tucson, Ariz., can't get enough of LaHaye and Jenkins' work. And she's not so sure the novels are fiction. "I think the books are so real," she says, "that Left Behind could happen today, this minute, to all of us."

--Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York