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Writing about Left Behind the other day, I realized that I kept making comparisons to soap operas. And the more I thought about it, the more similarities presented themselves:

Premise
Left Behind: nigh-endless adventure series obsessed with the Rapture.
Soap Operas: nigh-endless drama serial obsessed with romance.

Continuity
Left Behind: you can skip a book and still know pretty much exactly what's going on.
Soap Operas: you can skip a month and still know pretty much exactly what's going on.

Porn Names
Left Behind: Rayford Steele, Buck Williams, Dirk Burton, Nicholae Carpathia, Hattie Durham, Chloe Steele.
Soap Operas: Ridge, Cord, Jax, Stone, Decker, Greenlee, Flash, Kendell, Starr.

Consequences
Left Behind: God punishes those who have sex outside marriage.
Soap Operas: God punishes those who have sex without love. Unless they're really hot.

God is Listening
Left Behind: If you pray for a sign from God, the next person you see will get you out of whatever impossible jam you're facing at the moment.
Soap Operas: If you pray for a sign from God, the next person you see will be your new love interest.

First Impressions
Left Behind: If you take an instant dislike to someone, that's a pretty good indicator that s/he is a minion of the Antichrist.
Soap Operas: If you take an instant dislike to someone, that's a pretty good indicator that you will very soon have sex with him/her.

Family Planning
Left Behind: No one ever uses birth control, and anyone who even considers an abortion ends up a minion of the Antichrist.
Soap Operas: No one ever uses birth control, and anyone who has an abortion ends up in a mental hospital.

Pride Goeth
Left Behind: The good characters are insufferably self-righteous, and horrible things are always happening to them.
Soap Operas: The good characters are insufferably self-righteous, and horrible things are always happening to them.

Finally, a couple of major differences:

The Wages of Sin
Left Behind: The evil characters are pompous, too serious and not much fun.
Soap Operas: The evil characters are way more fun, and generally way more interesting, than the good characters.

The Road Less Travelled
Left Behind: The authors are obsessed with all aspects of travel. Pretty much every major event is told through the lens of people traveling from one place to another. The travel itineraries tend to replace more important and more interesting narrative.
Soap Operas: Distance is meaningless. Every building in town is next door to every other building. It takes a half hour to fly from upstate New York to Puerto Rico. Not a moment is wasted on getting from point A to point B. The only time you see someone traveling is if they're about to have a car accident or plane crash.

Went to the library today. Among other things I got the next Left Behind book. Well actually, the third. The second was out. But I found that I didn't have any trouble at all skipping from book 1 to book 3, didn't feel like I had missed a thing. I guess in a multi-part series they have to write it so that readers who can't get one of the books can skip ahead to the next without feeling totally lost. Still, I felt a little like a soap viewer -- if you can watch 2 days out of 5 and still know exactly what's going on, why would you bother to tape the show every day? Only if you love the characters and want to experience as much of them as possible. Unfortunately the characters in Left Behind are too flat to inspire that kind of dedication.

So anyway, I've gotten sucked into the Left Behind series. The writing is abysmally bad but it is entertaining, I'll grant it that. In fact I read the entire third book last night. It's interesting to compare this series to other, more successful books. There's the "near future post-apocalyptic fantasy/horror": The Stand by Stephen King. The "sweeping, multi-part epic with religious themes": Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. The "fish out of water, ordinary American guy dropped into Christian mythos": Inferno by Larry Niven. All more enjoyable to read than Left Behind.

None of these comparisons are really fair, I guess, because [snarky aside] those other writers all know how to write. Okay, actually I was going to say that none of the other authors are bound by strict faithfulness (slavish devotion you might say) to source material, which has been the downfall of many adaptations. Inferno is the only one that even references Christian source material (not the Bible, though as I understand it Left Behind isn't based on the Bible either, rather on a particular interpretation thereof) and Niven has a certain irreverence that I don't expect to see from Jenkins and LaHaye. For instance I doubt they will have anyone, much less their protagonist, call God "the Big Juju."

Also I think the obvious dual goals of converting unbelievers and inspiring believers interfere with Left Behind's ability to entertain. The lengthy conversion scenes drag the story down, all the True Christians come off like total drips, and when bad girl Hattie complains about how preachy and annoying they are, I'm right there with her. (I kind of sympathize with Hattie just for being forced to say that the rapture of all the fetuses was a bad thing because it put her sister who works for an abortion clinic out of work! Just like with soaps, when the writers make a character do and say outrageous things to show how e.v.i.l. they are, I often end up sympathizing with that character and resenting the alleged heroes.)

On the other hand, as an avowed atheist I'm surely not the target audience for the book. My guess is the proselytizing is aimed at casual Christians or those of the "wrong" denomination, which according to the book seems to be everyone except extreme conservative Baptists. (Even the pope isn't part of the rapture! He ends up leading the Antichrist's one world religion.)

On the third hand, I don't think The Book of the New Sun has any intent to proselytize, but I found Severian's epiphany (when he realizes that every thorn on every bush is like the Claw of the Conciliator, and throws his shoes in the water so as to walk barefoot on holy ground) deeply affecting. So I know I'm not immune to spiritual themes in fiction. It just has to be, you know, well written.