The Left Behind Complete Set, Series 1-12

by Tim LaHaye

Rayford Steele’s mind was on a woman he had never touched.

Woof! This is the opening sentence of the book, and there’s so much to unpack. The bad name, the fact that we’re introduced to our main character via their sex life, the weirdly judgmental tone we’re getting from the narrator, and how about the fact that this sentence does nothing to pull us into the story. This single line made me want to read the whole series. Hands and feet inside the vehicle, folks, because here we go!

Rayford imagined Hattie Durham’s smile

What even are these names?!

God was OK with Rayford Steele.

The authors and I will have to agree to disagree about “OK” vs “okay”

“Blessing my socks off” had become the smiling response that seemed to satisfy them,

To be fair, that would shut me up

What he enjoyed most was that she was a toucher. Nothing inappropriate, nothing showy. She simply touched his arm as she brushed past or rested her hand gently on his shoulder when she stood behind his seat in the cockpit. It wasn’t her touch alone that made Rayford enjoy her company. He could tell from her expressions, her demeanor, her eye contact that she at least admired and respected him. Whether she was interested in anything more, he could only guess. And so he did. They had spent time together, chatting for hours over drinks or dinner, sometimes with coworkers, sometimes not. He had not returned so much as one brush of a finger, but his eyes had held her gaze, and he could only assume his smile had made its point.

Narrator describes what are almost definitely dates, but the character can only guess that Hattie is into him.

He was the pilot who had once consumed two martinis during a snowy shutdown at O’Hare and then voluntarily grounded himself when the weather cleared. He offered to pay for bringing in a relief pilot, but Pan-Continental was so impressed that instead they made an example of his self-discipline and wisdom.

You, sir, would be fired edit: Realized that I totally misread this passage. In my head, he was already in the air when he had the martinis, and grounding himself meant landing it under the influence, then getting a commendation for how well he landed it.

Would someone with his reputation ever do anything but dream about a beautiful woman fifteen years his junior?

What alternate world is this guy living in that he thinks these things don’t happen?

“Can you imagine, Rafe,” she exulted,

First line of dialogue, and you went with “exulted”?

“Just forgiven, yeah, I know,” he said, feeling rejected and vulnerable in his own living room.

Ah yes, the living room, most secure of rooms. If someone made me feel vulnerable in the garage or kitchen or family room, that would be one thing; but the living room... I would just feel violated.

Dare he assert himself even now, hours before touchdown?

The narrator writes about romance like he’s considering going in public with mismatched socks.

The envy of the rest of the veteran staff, he either scooped them on or was assigned to the best stories in the world. Both admirers and detractors at the magazine called him Buck, because they said he was always bucking tradition and authority.

How does one man scoop all the best stories in the world?

A year and two months earlier, his January 1 cover story had taken him to Israel to interview Chaim Rosenzweig and had resulted in the most bizarre event he had ever experienced.

Cue wind-chimes and ripple effect for flashback!

executive editor Steve Plank

I don’t *want* to highlight every new character name, but you’re leaving me no choice

“Not so fast, Cowboy,” a rival said,

I too refer to my coworkers as rivals. Their names are unimportant.

“I just think this is a technical piece, a science story,” Buck’s detractor muttered.

I hope this is a main character, but we never learn his or her name. The authors just have to keep coming up with more creative ways to state their identity relative to the other characters.

Such confidence from his boss and competition from his peers made him all the more determined to outdo himself with every assignment.

Rosenzweig was fascinating, of course, but it was his discovery, or invention—no one knew quite how to categorize it—that was truly the “newsmaker of the year.” The humble man called himself a botanist, but he was in truth a chemical engineer who had concocted a synthetic fertilizer that caused the desert sands of Israel to bloom like a greenhouse.

In this paragraph, we learn that this character is fascinating AND humble — two characteristics I could never have gleamed from dialogue or actions.

Rosenzweig’s formula was fast making Israel the richest nation on earth, far more profitable than its oil-laden neighbors. Every inch of ground blossomed with flowers and grains, including produce never before conceivable in Israel. The Holy Land became an export capital, the envy of the world, with virtually zero unemployment. Everyone prospered.

Everyone knows that grain countries hold all the power. Also, zero unemployment?!

Flush with cash and resources, Israel made peace with her neighbors.

Ha!

Free trade and liberal passage allowed all who loved the nation to have access to it. What they did not have access to, however, was the formula.

Its value was only second to the Krabby Patty Secret Formula

The very fact that Buck was housed by the military evidenced the importance of security.

Redundant sentence.

Imagine what the formula might do if modified to work on the vast tundra of Russia!

This thought was so horrifying to the narrator that they used an exclamation point. Also, how would fertilizer that worked on a Mediterranean desert help in any way with the icy tundra? Also, by this book’s logic, Russia becoming a grain giant might just lead it to make peace with its neighbors and open “free trade and liberal passage [to] all who loved the nation.”

Frustrated at their inability to profit from Israel’s fortune and determined to dominate and occupy the Holy Land, the Russians had launched an attack against Israel in the middle of the night. The assault became known as the Russian Pearl Harbor,

Where can I get this passage framed?

The number of aircraft and warheads made it clear their mission was annihilation.

How many nukes would indicate non-annihilation?

To say the Israelis were caught off guard, Cameron Williams had written, was like saying the Great Wall of China was long.

Quoth the journalist of the century

There would be no more negotiating, no more pleas for a sharing of the wealth with the hordes of the north.

Wow, this is some WWI-level propaganda coming at us from left field.

But what had happened to the rest of the Russian air corps? Radar showed they had clearly sent nearly every plane they had, leaving hardly anything in reserve for defense.

They sent their entire air force in one attack?!

Buck had always wanted to be near the front lines, but his survival instinct was on full throttle.

What does the first half of this sentence have to do with the second half? Why the but?

Several minutes into the holocaust,

Can we not?

Anything atomic and explosive erupted high in the atmosphere,

Dude, that many nukes are still gonna ruin your day

Suddenly the only sound was the fire in the sky, and it began to fade as it drifted lower.

What a strange combo of sensory descriptors

Among the ruins, the Israelis found combustible material that would serve as fuel and preserve their natural resources for more than six years.

Six YEARS’ worth of fuel that survived the flaming hail and plane crashes???

Special task forces competed with buzzards and vultures for the flesh of the enemy dead, trying to bury them before their bones were picked clean and disease threatened the nation.

Who knows what diseases those “hordes of the north” were carrying

Buck remembered it vividly, as if it were yesterday.

More wind chimes! More ripples! More, I say! And get me pictures of Spider-Man!

Jewish scholars pointed out passages from the Bible that talked about God destroying Israel’s enemies with a firestorm, earthquake, hail, and rain. Buck was stunned when he read Ezekiel 38 and 39 about a great enemy from the north invading Israel with the help of Persia, Libya, and Ethiopia. More stark was that the Scriptures foretold of weapons of war used as fire fuel and enemy soldiers eaten by birds or buried in a common grave.

These authors want the reader to know just how much research they did. “See, we contrived a way to make this verse come true! It’s not bad writing if it’s from the Bible.”

The senior flight attendant pulled him into the galleyway, but there was no passion in her touch. Her fingers felt like talons on his forearm, and her body shuddered in the darkness.

She pulled his head down so she could speak directly into his ear. Despite her weeping, she was plainly fighting to make herself understood.

The physical interactions between characters during dialogue is bonkers

Hattie slipped from his grasp and knelt whimpering in the corner.

So much for one of our two female characters so far

Was he asleep now? He bit his lip hard and winced at the pain. So he was wide awake.

I love the imagery of someone actually doing this and expecting different results

What nonsense! he thought as he descended, aware of Hattie right behind him. “We’ll find him”?

As if the incredibly close, third person narrator weren’t enough, we also get italicized stream-of-conciousness

He backed into a secluded spot behind the bulkhead and slapped himself hard on the cheek.

I hope he keeps trying to wake himself up throughout the book in increasingly comical ways. If he’s in a bar, he could break the nearest pool cue over his head. At a restaurant, he could start squirting ketchup packets into his eyes. And so on...

Hattie grabbed Rayford from behind and wrapped her hands so tight around his chest that he could hardly breathe. “Rayford, what is this?”

I just realized that the narrator described Hattie as “touchy” at the start. Which means that every time she says something, we get an update on what strange way she’s touching the characters around her.

Rayford didn’t know if he had done the right thing by leaving Hattie in charge of the passengers and crew.

It’s not like she’s the chief flight attendant or anything, and would probably be the best trained to deal with the passengers and crew in a crisis. Oh, wait...

He, and most of his passengers, had been left behind.

Dun dun dun!

Buck had helped the old man put his herringbone wool jacket and felt hat in the overhead bin when they boarded. Harold was a short, dapper gentleman in penny loafers, brown slacks, and a tan sweater-vest over a shirt and tie. He was balding, and Buck assumed he would want the hat again later when the air-conditioning kicked in.

We get a full description of this guy’s outfit so that we know that Buck knows that those are his clothes later.

Somehow he knew this was no dream,

But he hasn’t done anything to test it yet!

he decided to play amateur electrician. These phone lines always have the same color wires, he decided, so he opened his computer and cut the wire leading to the female connector. Inside the phone, he cut the wire and sliced off the protective rubber coating. Sure enough, the four inner wires from both computer and phone looked identical. In a few minutes, he had spliced them together.

Never heard of someone hot-wiring a phone line into their laptop

At the top of the screen a status bar flashed every twenty seconds, informing him that the connection to his ramp on the information superhighway was busy.

Can’t tell if weird writing or just because the internet was new

“Listen, beautiful Hattie, are we or are we not looking at the end of the world as we know it?” “Don’t patronize me, sir. I can’t let you sit here and vandalize airline property.”

He swore,

Kind of a pet peeve of mine when this phrase shows up instead of dialogue