I read the first Left Behind a few years back and I found it not exactly a *great* read, but it certainly had a story value (to use Alec Guiness' description of the Star Wars script). But, as I wrote in Rooster Spice at the time, it's basically porn, in the sense that it shows an idealized version of reality from which all dissonances have been removed (Islam? What's that?).

Idealized it is - after all, every nation on Earth gives up its arsenal (and thus any defense of its sovereignity) without even so much as an hour's hesitation. Every child under the age of puberty - even in the womb - has vanished, yet parents go about their business as if nothing has happened, and only a few days later, people are more interested in hearing news about the recently elected President of Romania reciting an alphabetical list of the United Nations than in figuring out what happened to their friends and loved ones. No stages of grief, no disruption in commerce, no humanity.

And then there's the characterizations of the protagonists. One of Slacktivist's most common complaints is that, despite being continually described as a superlative investigative journalist, Buck Williams is utterly incurious about the world around him. People vanish off the plane he's flying on, over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and his most pressing desire is to hotwire a connection between the airphone and his laptop - not to report on the amazing thing that just happened, but to check his email. Landing in Chicago, with death and destruction all around, this seasoned reporter's blinkered obsession is to get back to his office in New York, and not, say, actually report on what's happening around him. (This is, of course, the same guy who was in Israel when Russia and Ethiopia launched their entire nuclear arsenals at it, with the only casualties being the Russian pilots themselves... and who steadfastly scoffed at any suggestion of the supernatural for nearly four hundred pages.)

Though you're right - it does, I think, have story value. It was simply poorly served by its authors, one of whom took pride in how quickly he churned out each book in the series, rather than how well he crafted them. In the hands of a competent author, it could have been more than premillennial porn, more than mere fodder for the Schadenfreude of the self-righteous.

(And why the hell am I so alliterative today?)