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We All Fall Down is by Brian Caldwell, who, as it turns out, teaches high school English here in Massachusetts.
Haven't heard of the book previously, but it sounds like a corker:
Caught up in the Christian end times, [the hero] tries to use his learning to advantage without submitting to God...
... [Demons] give a long speech to explain away the Rapture in terms of alien intervention, but the apocalyptically savvy protagonist just laughs at the devil's obviousness: "Nice try, cocksucker. Next time why don't you just try offering me the fucking apple."
Now that's an Apocalypse I can live with!
The book has, unsurprisingly, drawn sharply divided reviews: the Left Behind crowd can't get past the profanity and the graphic violence (which were also a source of difficulty between my collaborator and me on our own abortive Rapture-themed project) to the hard questions about faith and responsibility: indeed, those very questions may be a strike against the book, in the eyes of that audience.
Interesting article on Christian Apocalyptic Fiction and its relation to Science Fiction, of which it is sometimes deemed a subset.
Then there's Michael Tolkin's 1991 film The Rapture, which finds its axis somewhere between Robert Altman and Ingmar Bergman: its auctorial point-of-view seems that of an agnostic or atheist sympathetic to the hunger for connection, for meaning, that leads people to blind faith (though he stacks the deck a bit by including elements of direct revelation).
Mostly it's a polemic on the perils of anthropomorphizing God—the heroine, in the end, is unable to submit to a Divine justice that she finds cruel and, well, inhuman. |
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