I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned that Slacktivist (Fred Clark) has been re-reading and critiquing the Left Behind books for several years. I’ve never read them, so Fred’s synopses have been my only exposure to them.

Fred often shows disdain for the “writing” done by LaHaye and Jenkins, and I can understand why. Here’s a sample of Fred’s criticism that just blew me away when I read it this afternoon:

Rayford Steele and Hattie Durham are sitting in a restaurant discussing the sorry state of her relationship with Nicolae Carpathia. That’s what’s going on here — a conversation about a woman’s relationship with her boyfriend/fiancé.

[snip]

But all of the many ways we could critique this scene as an ordinary conversation about the state of one woman’s relationship would be beside the point, because the biggest problem with this scene is that it attempts to present an ordinary conversation about the state of one woman’s relationship.

That’s bonkers. Hattie isn’t just dating some random guy. Her “boyfriend” is The Antichrist — the global “potentate” who just spent the previous two days nuking dozens of cities and carrying out the worst mass-murder in the history of the world.

That never comes up in this conversation.

O-o-o-o-kay.

Fred’s on Book Two, I think. If you’re interested, he’s got archival copies of all his previous takedowns.