Odd thoughts
Jun. 24th, 2009 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltdI 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...
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...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-06-25 10:11 am (UTC)Most Christians I know do believe in the Rapture. Many of them look forward to it like it's going to be Christmas and their birthday and every good thing rolled into one. The rest dread it. Then again, these are people whose idea of a practical joke is to leave piles of clothes around the campus of the college so the poor schmuck who forgot the daylight savings changeover thinks he's been forgotten by God.
1) Only Christians get to go because it's the Christian god playing out his Grand Guignol end-times scenario. Makes no sense for him to take those who aren't his. (At one point I considered leaving all the women behind, regardless of faith, because Eve is never actually ensouled back in Genesis)
2)Because it's what the Hebrew god DOES. Haven't you read your Bible? The flood, the plagues of Egypt, David's child by Bathsheba, the 42 kids eaten by bears for making fun of a Prophet. Seriously, the idea is that the children are caught up alive--like everyone else--and will be back for the Millennium.
3) Left Behind is copycatting a great deal of Rapture literature that came before. It's a trope. And the women in LB never seem particularly disturbed.
We see what you describe in LB (again, trope of the genre), but we are never on the ground mopping up afterward or coping with the crap. Aside from stage dressing, the L:B world rolls merrily along as it always did,
Only Christians get raptured because it's their god. And not even ALL Christians go. It is weird. And unjust. And terrifying. And THAT is the point.
Your suspension of disbelief is weak. We're talking about an all-powerful deity. Can we not assume he can translate people straight to heaven?
The idea is aimed at the people who think we have any common cause with people who are grimly and joyfully waiting for this nightmare to happen, because they plan to sit on the heavenly sidelines and watch while everyone else suffers.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-25 10:50 am (UTC)Because I was picturing them getting run over by Mr. Christian Trucker's eighteen-wheeler. That's why.
Most Christians I know do believe in the Rapture.
Really? I don't know of a single one who does. And I know a fair number of Christians.
1) Only Christians get to go because it's the Christian god playing out his Grand Guignol end-times scenario. Makes no sense for him to take those who aren't his.
Oooookay. See, the idea that only the Christians are his and everyone else can go hang? That's really, REALLY offensive. Another problem with this premise.
2)Because it's what the Hebrew god DOES. Haven't you read your Bible? The flood, the plagues of Egypt, David's child by Bathsheba, the 42 kids eaten by bears for making fun of a Prophet. Seriously, the idea is that the children are caught up alive--like everyone else--and will be back for the Millennium.
Sure I've read it. Several times. It's a singularly boring book of fairy tales, but eh, some people like it.
However, you're not dealing with an ancient book of fairy tales. You're talking about an actual novel with plot and character development. And that means that it would be good if God's behavior made some sense. Just saying, "That's the way it happened in the Bible!" isn't enough.
Only Christians get raptured because it's their god. And not even ALL Christians go. It is weird. And unjust. And terrifying. And THAT is the point.
God can treat people like crap if he wants to. He often wants to. Yes, I get that.
Is that the point? I'm sorry, I'm just baffled.
We're talking about an all-powerful deity. Can we not assume he can translate people straight to heaven?
Not everyone is going to see God the same way, or accept that that there is a God at all.
Mind you, disagreement over canon wouldn't matter in most cases. You could posit sparkly vampires, as Meyer did, and while people would grumble about folklore, most people would swallow it for the sake of the story.
But this isn't fantasy. Or at least it isn't what most people would call fantasy. It's religion. And religious attitudes--like the conceit that only Christians go to heaven or that God has no interest in anyone of any other faith--have roots in a lot of blood-stained history. You can't lightly say such things without hurting someone who had a friend or a family who suffered and/or died for being the wrong religion.
And religion, at the best of times, is a very titchy subject. You're already upset because I'm not buying this premise.
The idea is aimed at the people who think we have any common cause with people who are grimly and joyfully waiting for this nightmare to happen, because they plan to sit on the heavenly sidelines and watch while everyone else suffers.
Which means that it has no audience at all. If they think that sitting in heaven and watching other people suffer for their entertainment is even vaguely good and virtuous, why would they choose to read their dearest fantasies packaged as a horror story? Either they don't want to think about how others will suffer, or they have revved themselves up to the point where they think those who haven't floated off into the ether deserve all the misery they get. Which is small, spiteful and petty, but I doubt if you can argue them out of it. They want validation of their beliefs, and whether you approve or not, that's probably how they will read it. (Well, that or blasphemy, because if God is the monster, does that make the Antichrist the hero?)
I'm sorry, Angelia, but I really don't think that this will work. It's too sensitive and too political a topic, some of the premises are not, shall we say, ecumenical, and I don't know who would read it.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-25 07:26 pm (UTC)And she is typical of the people I grew up around. I was in my 20s before I met Christians who didn't believe in it. I was in my late 30s before I met clergy who had never heard of it.
The idea is to take all those spiritually uplifting books about the event, in which nothing really bad ever happens to the newly-Christian protagonist--although a near relative might be martyred--and turn them on their head. I am attempting to lampshade an entire genre.
That means I have to play by the major rules of the genre: only Christians get raptured. The Christian god is not ecumenical, although he does have work for the Jews. (Asking why only Christians go is like asking why vampires only drink blood)
It's not fantasy. And it's not religion. It's horror. And if you don't accept the baseline premises--vampires drink blood, werewolves change on the full moon and this particular god only likes Christians--any horror is going to fall flat.
And I'm cranky because you never seem to have anything by squelching comments about how every idea sucks and will never work.
And yes, it is touchy and political. That's the only sort of thing really worth writing.
Who would read it: mainline protestants uneasy with premillennialist theology. Walk-aways from premillennialism. Pagans (one of the main characters is). Even premillennialists who are a) uneasy or b) looking for torture porn, with the blood running as deep as the horses' bridles.