The disappearance of two billion people is an astonishing premise, but we're willing to play along. Deus ex machina as starting-point? OK, tell us more. But here we have something that ought to seem familiar and completely natural -- reporters gather for press conference following politician's speech -- and instead it comes across as unimaginably, inhumanly strange. No one talks or acts or thinks in any recognizable way. We are willing to imagine the unimaginable, the fantastical and outlandish. But get the ordinary this wrong and you lose us. Read more

You see this again and again in Left Behind wherever the authors are forced to describe in particular the things they obsessively fear and oppose -- whether it's feminism, the United Nations or "the media." For all of their preoccupation with these things, they have no idea what they actually look like. "As long as you don't expect me to cook or something sexist and domestic like that." Feminists don't talk like that. Humans don't talk like that. Read more