Judgment Day [Hardcover]

At the start of David's bloated, near-future SF novel, the first in a new Christian apocalyptic series, a God-given breakthrough in engine design allows a 20-year-old religious cult, the Fellowship of the Faithful, to launch a spacecraft, Rising Savior, from the town of Christ's Home, Calif. In two years, the Faithful achieve a near-monopoly on space, threatened only by a counter-cult of blood-sacrificing Luciferians led by Manuel Crow, a former funeral parlor magnate who has "served the master of the underworld" for the same two decades. To escape Crow and the thousand-year Satanic reign he's engineering from his seat in Congress, Faithful leader Ira Breitling shepherds his flock to Planet America, where they battle for humanity's very soul. Filled with clichéd situations drawn from tabloid headlines, the book at times reads like a parody. Wooden dialogue, predictable plot machinations, heavy-handed dogma (both Christian and demonic) and two verging-on-one-dimensional characters leave little opportunity for spiritual uplift. Even though, by the merciful end, David has doggedly pulled out comic-book stops like deep-space booby traps, lethal asteroids and kamikaze spheres for spaceship destruction, his soggy space opera can barely manage a closing whimper. Agent, Carol McCleary. $75,000 national marketing campaign.
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Here's a fat apocalyptic novel Left Behind readers will like. There are a number of flying-saucer cults across the U.S., akin to every loopy, gather-on-the-mountain cult since the 1840s. The difference this time is that God has granted a faster-than-light spaceship drive to one of them, a fundamentalist movement called the Light in the Darkness Fellowship. After nearly bankrupting NASA with their efficient satellite launches, the fellowship begins a mass exodus to a virginal planet they call "America." In other words, they provide their own rapture, which may be David's most innovative contribution to apocalyptic literature. (His anti-Christ, U.S. president Manuel Crow, is not so innovative, but he's diabolical enough.) Readers could have done without David's lengthy lambasting of regression therapy used, in Satan's plan, to condemn the fellowship's parents of child abuse; this beats a horse that died about 10 years ago. Environmentalists come in for similar drubbing, with still more right-wing boilerplate about spotted owls and the like. None of David's fundamentalists is compellingly drawn, but he tells a good love story that dramatizes the difficulties between a fundamentalist workaholic and a liberal Christian counselor. And the last third of his novel, full of descriptions of the new planet's flora and fauna and of the pioneer's life that fellowship members eagerly embrace, is good-humored and grand, worthy of Kim Stanley Robinson. While no Luke Skywalker emerges, the climactic battle in the heavens is passionate and affecting, adding something new to the apocalyptic genre and linking it to the best military sf. John Mort
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