valarltd | Odd thoughts

I had inspiration while driving.

It occurs to me that while flower-fairies will be sweet and sell, I really really want to write the Rapture Horror Novel.

Has anyone done a horror novel where God is the biggest monster of all?
(or is that, itself, cliche?)

There are 2.1 Billion Christians in the world. Assume 1.4 billion vanish in the rapture (that's about 2/3rd). That's everyone from Fred Phelps and Rick Santorum to Pope Ratzinger and Bishop Robinson to the lovely lady down the block who gives half of her fixed income to the local soup kitchen. (in fairness, she probably has a better chance than the first three)

Think about the chaos caused by 1.4 BILLION people vanishing into thin air, 150 million of them here in the US.
People who are not just sleeping and eating and praying, but people who are flying planes and driving cars and operating heavy machinery and fighting fires and doing life-saving surgery.

How many people are going to die in car accidents when driverless cars--or worse, semis!--plow into them? How many planes are going to crash?

And those people have jobs. Vital jobs. The supply chain to stores will be disrupted. There will be food shortages, even before the droughts and the locusts and the famines and crop failures. First responders will be short of help. Utilities may have trouble. All services will be disrupted.

What's life going to be like for the folks picking up the pieces after Mr. Christian Trucker has an "O Hai Jesus!" moment and vanishes, letting his cruise-controlled rig plow blithely on its way, into the minivans full of mom and kids? Or for the non-Christian ministers, dealing with every pregnant woman in their flock suddenly having the baby vanish, and every mother of preschoolers wailing for her loss?

And then the supernatural stuff starts:
meteors that poison the water
droughts
Earthquakes
the sun going black
1/4 of the population dying from food shortages and animal attacks (we're down to 3.5 billion!)
locust plagues
food shortages
Wars to kill another 1/3rd of the people (we're down to 2.3 billion!)
Witnesses who bring a three year drought
The Antichrist shows up AFTER all this.
70-lb hailstones
a plague of darkness and boils
a huge battle where everyone dies and the birds glut themselves.

Tell me this shouldn't be written as a horror novel...