Left Behind

In the space of a single breath, they are gone. Pilots vanish from their cockpits, drivers from moving cars, children from their beds, clothing left folded where the faithful stood. This is the world of Left Behind: the morning after the Rapture, when the believers are caught up to heaven and everyone else is left to live through what Scripture warned was coming. Airline captain Rayford Steele and reporter Buck Williams are among those who missed it, and who must now decide what to believe as the seven-year Tribulation begins to count down around them. Built on a dispensationalist reading of Revelation, the series is the work of prophecy teacher Tim LaHaye and novelist Jerry B. Jenkins, and it runs far past its famous first volume. The main sequence spans sixteen novels, from Left Behind through Nicolae, The Mark, and Glorious Appearing to the closing Kingdom Come, charting the rise of the smiling Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia and the small band called the Tribulation Force who resist him. Three prequels (The Rising, The Regime, The Rapture) reach back to the disappearance itself; a forty-book Left Behind: The Kids follows teenagers through the same doomed years, and Mel Odom's Apocalypse quartet fights the end times from a soldier's foxhole. The register is the airport thriller wired to the pulpit: plain, propulsive prose, cliffhanger chapters, an ever-present ticking clock toward Armageddon. Begin with the first novel, Left Behind, the vanishing that opens it is the doorway to everything after, and the original twelve-book arc through Glorious Appearing is the spine. Save the prequels for later; the empty seats land hardest when you meet them cold.