The Left Behind Complete Set, Series 1-12

by Tim LaHaye

With an acumen he didn’t realize he possessed, Buck speed-tapped the keys that retrieved and filed all his messages, downloaded them, and backed him out of the linkup in seconds.

Acumen is not the right word for typing fast

Hattie hurried to Buck. “Anything?” He shook his head apologetically. “Thanks for trying,” she said. And she began to weep.

For some reason, I’m hedging my bets against us getting any well-written female characters. I’d love to be wrong, but this does not bode well.

A snake of humanity wended its way slowly out of the great terminal buildings,

Thanks, I hate this descriptor

She appeared to be trying to smile.

What?

Harold’s wife

Wait, do we ever find out her name? She's just the wife of the guy who got raptured?

A bit enthusiastic, he landed not on his seat but on his shoulders, which threw his feet over the top of his head. He picked up speed and hit the bottom with his weight shifting forward. The buggy-whip centripetal force slammed his stockinged feet to the ground and brought his torso up and over in a somersault that barely missed planting his face on the concrete. At the last instant, still hanging on to his bag for dear life, he tucked his head under and took the abrasion on the back of his head rather than on his nose. He fought the urge to say, “No problem,” but he couldn’t keep from rubbing the back of his head, already matted with blood. It wasn’t a serious problem, only a nuisance.

Weird complication in deplaning that doesn't seem to matter

don’t treat me like a little woman.”

Rayford got in line, beginning to feel the tension of having flown too long and known too little.

Funny, he had no emotional attraction whatever to Hattie just now. But he felt obligated to be sure she got home.

Rayford wanted to stop and tell her to quit making him work so hard. That frustrated him about people her age. They enjoyed a volleying conversation game. He liked to get to the point.

Authors shake fists at young people and their conversation skills, despite the dialogue we've already seen in this book

“Only way she’s not coming is if you can’t handle the weight!” “What do you weigh, doll?” the pilot said. “One-fifteen!” “I can handle the weight!”

I can't believe we're getting told this woman's weight as a plot point. Were the authors trying to reinforce her attractiveness?

He hadn’t been living for them anyway, certainly not the last several months. He had been playing around on the edges of his mind with the girl in his lap, though he had never gone so far as touching her, even when she often touched him.

This is a good place to mention the no-man’s-land of adultery that Rayford is in from the start of the book. He would be a more interesting character if he was actually having an affair with Hattie, and then had to wrestle with that guilt for the rest of the book, knowing that he could never apologize to his wife. But the authors feel that the audience either would not relate to-, or would never support an adulterous main character. So, this is a situation of wanting to have their cake and eat it too. They want a main character who’s flawed, and obviously sinful enough to not get raptured, but not so flawed that he draws the ire of the conservative reader. What we’re left with is an incredibly dull character with no consequential flaws. He wants to have an affair, but he’s too boring to actually do it.

“I hope everyone’s OK at your place!” she said. “Call me and let me know, OK?” He nodded. “OK?” she insisted. “OK!”

Trying not to let the "OK" thing bother me, but passages like this make it difficult

Steve Plank, his executive editor,

We KNOW who Steve Plank is by now

Political editor wants to cover a Jewish Nationalist conference in Manhattan that has something to do with a new world order government.

The other religious conference in town is among leaders of all the major religions, from the standard ones to the New Agers, also talking about a one-world religious order.

This exposition dump drops a lot of "how would that even happen?" scenarios on us, and just expects us to roll with it. Like, not even "how would they put together one worldwide religion?", just "who would even qualify as leaders of some of the major religions?" and "how did you get them in one room?" Also, I guess this is our b-plot? Pretty blunt introduction, but I can roll with the punches.

Everybody’s pretty enamored with this Carpathia guy from Romania who so impressed your friend Rosenzweig. He’s got everybody in a bind in the upper house in his own country because he’s been invited to speak at the U.N. in a couple of weeks. Nobody knows how he wangled an invitation, but his international popularity reminds me a lot of Walesa or even Gorbachev.

Not saving our antichrist reveal to be any sort of surprise, I see

“Be a big boy there, stud.

Steve Plank’s secretary, the matronly Marge Potter.

These names...

Every few houses had driveways jammed with cars, people milling about. It appeared everyone everywhere had lost someone.

So, I'm curious where the line is drawn in this book between real Christians and nominal Christians. It seems like a lot of people got raptured, which would conflict with the whole narrow path to heaven thing that Jesus mentions.

Rayford stood in the driveway and waved to the woman till she was out of sight. The yard and the walk were spotless as usual, and the huge home, his trophy house, was sepulchral.

Irene was a fastidious housekeeper. Her morning routine included the coffeepot on a timer kicking on at six, percolating her special blend of decaf with an egg.

Is the egg part of the coffee percolation?

Raymie.

"Hi, I'm Rayford, and this is my son, Raymie."

His own voice sounded strange to him. He detected in it a fatalism, as if he knew he was not leaving a message for his wife and son, but only pretending to.

He moseyed through the family room to the garage exit.

It was nearly Buck Williams’s turn at the head of the line at the Pan-Con Club counter when he found the material he had been looking for on disk.

Look at all those prepositions

“And he was . . . ?” “Nicolae Carpathia.” “Carpathia like the—?” “Yes, like the Carpathian Mountains. A melodic name, you must admit.

I mean, it is one of the more believable names in this book, but don't pat yourself too hard on the back

Blond and blue-eyed, like the original Romanians, who came from Rome, before the Mongols affected their race.”

You are a member, aren’t you?” “Am I a member!” “Gold or platinum?” “Lady, I’m, like, a kryptonite member.” He flashed his card, showing that he was among the top 3 percent of air travelers in the world. If any flight had one seat in the cheapest section, it had to be given to him and upgraded to first class at no charge. “Oh, my gosh,” she said,

The picture was signed, “To Raymie with love, Dad.” Under that he had written, “Rayford Steele, Captain, Pan-Continental Airlines, O’Hare.” He shook his head. What kind of a dad autographs a picture for his own son?

My thought exactly

Buck Williams ducked into a stall in the Pan-Con Club men’s room to double-check his inventory. Tucked in a special pouch inside his jeans, he carried thousands of dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks, redeemable in dollars, Euros, or yen. His one leather bag contained two changes of clothes, his laptop, cell phone, digital recorder, accessories, toiletries, and some serious, insulated winter gear.

Buck sounds like my character in Skyrim. You never know when you'll need that potion of fortify light armor

the Global Weekly’s bureau chief there, a fiftyish black woman named Lucinda Washington.

Oh, come on

He was following a tip from a former Princeton classmate, a Welshman who had been working in the London financial district since graduate school. Dirk Burton

Anyway, the scuttlebutt is that this guy is real hot on getting the whole world onto one currency.

“Cameron,” he had said, unaware of the nickname bestowed by his friend’s colleagues,

Because I would have been so confused if this went uncommented-upon

“Jonathan Stonagal.” Buck had hoped Dirk would name someone ludicrous so he could burst into laughter.

Me too

Our guy in the group, Joshua Todd-Cothran,

Despite the incredible capabilities of his laptop, there was still no substitute for the pocket notebook.

“I wish I could say I tried to call you, Hattie, but I didn’t. This is hard for me.”

He knew Hattie was not a bad person. In fact, she was nice and friendly. But that was not why he had been interested in her. It had merely been a physical attraction, something he had been smart enough or lucky enough or naive enough not to have acted upon. He felt guilty for having considered it, and now his own grief would obliterate all but the most common courtesy of simply caring for a coworker.

“This is Ritz’s Charter Service. Here’s the deal in light of the crisis: I’ve got Learjets at both Palwaukee and Waukegan, but I’ve lost my other flyer. I can get to either airport, but right now they’re not lettin’ anyone into any of the major strips. Can’t get into Milwaukee, O’Hare, Kennedy, Logan, National, Dulles, Dallas, Atlanta. I can get into some of the smaller, outlying airports, but it’s a seller’s market. Sorry to be so opportunistic, but I’m asking twenty dollars a mile, cash up front. If I can find someone who wants to come back from where you’re goin’, I might be able to give you a little discount. I’m checkin’ messages tonight and will take off first thing in the morning. Longest trip with guaranteed cash gets me. If your stop is on the way, I’ll try to squeeze you in. Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you.”

That's a long voice mail leadup

Jeff must be beside himself not knowing about his wife, Sharon, and the kids. They’d had their differences and had even been separated before the children came along, but for several years the marriage had been better. Jeff’s wife had proven forgiving and conciliatory. Jeff himself admitted he was puzzled that she would take him back. “Call me undeserving, but grateful,” he once told Buck. Their son and daughter, who both looked like Jeff, were precious.

Any more of Jeff's life story we need to hear? I'm guessing he's important later, but he's not even in this scene.

“You can call me Hattie.” That struck him as humorous under the circumstances. She had been apologizing for being inappropriate, yet she didn’t want to be too formal. If he was Buck, she was Hattie.

Funny, her request had sounded like anything but a come-on. She seemed wholly sincere, and he was sure she was.

“I can imagine the wait.” “Like standing in line for a rental car in Orlando,” she said. Buck had never done that, but he could imagine that, too.

Was this a common refrain in the 90s?

“Their clothes are here, right where they were sitting. My daddy’s contact lenses are still on top of his bathrobe.”

This image in unintensionally comical. What else got left behind? I imagine dental fillings, dentures, glass eyeballs, pacemakers, piercings, etc. all just hanging in mid-air for a second. If you got a kidney transplanted from someone who got raptured, would the kidney disappear? Better yet, if a raptured person had an organ from a non-raptured person, would that organ get left behind in a pile of clothes? When you're too specific with your supernatural rules, it leads the audience to speculate about edge cases.

It had been ages since Rayford Steele had been drunk. Irene had never been much of a drinker, and she had become a teetotaler during the last few years. She insisted he hide any hard stuff if he had to have it in the house at all. She didn’t want Raymie even knowing his daddy still drank. “That’s dishonest,” Rayford had countered. “It’s prudent,” she said. “He doesn’t know everything, and he doesn’t have to know everything.” “How does that jibe with your insistence that we be totally truthful?” “Telling the whole truth doesn’t always mean telling everything you know. You tell your crew you’re taking a bathroom break, but you don’t go into detail about what you’re doing in there, do you?” “Irene!” “I’m just saying you don’t have to make it obvious to your preteen son that you drink hard liquor.”

I'm on Team Rayford here. It seems like the healthiest approach is the honest one. Just set a good example by drinking responsibly and making the boundaries clear.

He reached behind the empty cake cover in the highest cabinet over the sink and pulled down a half-finished fifth of whiskey. His inclination, knowing no one he cared about would ever see, was to tip it straight up and guzzle.

Don't waste good whiskey like that! Use tequila instead.

He was already getting a buzz when he replaced the bottle, then thought better of it. He slipped it into the garbage under the sink. Would this be a nice memorial to Irene, giving up even the occasional hard drink?

How noble

Finally he understood the bereaved who complained when their loved one was too mangled to see or whose body had been destroyed. They often complained that there was no sense of closure and that the grieving process was more difficult because they had a hard time imagining their loved one actually dead.

You only now can empathize?