Revoking Your Adjective License

It probably comes as no shock that I collect Christian Kitsch Fiction. During the years I wrote my zine, I secured review copies of hundreds of books and chewed through them at an earnest, prodigious rate. While quite a few genres had their cliches (Historical Romances Featuring Heroines Of Faith! New Age Murder Mysteries! Teen Dramas About Almost Kissing!) there’s no competition for King Of The Wacky. Rapture fiction — apocalyptic novels that revolve around Biblical prophecy and literal interpretation of the book of Revelation — will always reign supreme.

Most people have only heard of the wildly popular Left Behind and its many, many sequels. But there’s more — so much more — waiting in the bargain bins and Half.com accounts of the world. The mid 90s were especially good to the genre, and dozens of variations on the theme were printed by the Christian publishing houses that dominated at the time. I, naturally, have piles of them.

Seal Of Gaia is pretty representative of the worst of the genre. The plot — I use the word generously — involves a freaky glowing New Age Messiah, a selfish television producer named Steve, a giant missile called the TR6, and more We Told You So predictions than you can shake a stick at.

And, adjectives. Oh, the adjectives.

Set in 2033, Seal of Gaia is pretty tough to follow. So much energy is spent on breathless descriptions of Liberal New Age Ideas Taken To Horrific Extremes that there’s little time for character, story, or… well, anything other than painfully thick description slathered on like too much vanilla frosting. In the grim future, abortion is a celebration, and infanticide is legal until age 7! Liberals rule the earth — and nuke any countries that don’t surrender to the UN! Socialized medicine is everywhere — and people kill themselves because there’s not enough medicine to go around! Children are possessed by demons in school! ‘Educationists’ use LSD and VR gear to teach children The Lifeboat Game! The world worships a glowing floating antichrist guy! And there’s a conspiracy to manufacture a killer virus! To kill Christians! To reduce the population! Because everyone knows that population control makes Mother Gaia happy.

This kind of machine-gunned silliness is something that Slacktivist’s Fred Clark rightly recognized as Apocalyptic Wish Fulfillment when it happened in Left Behind. Rather than take the time to construct a reasonably plausible future — a rough idea of how the world would turn so horrfically strange — the author simply doctors up a population of Evil Straw Men. Why, in just twenty-five short years, will the US surrender its sovereignty to the UN and begin sterilization of anyone who doesn’t respect The Earth Mother? Because liberal New-Agers are in charge, obviously, and without Christians to explain why it’s wrong, no one will know better!

There’s one scene in which a secret, closeted Christian meekly suggests to her coworker that “These things were prophesied in the Bible.” The co-worker’s response? “What does that mean — prophecy?”

Uh-huh.

The whole idea of Judeo-Christian Morality being forgotten and society being consumed by its own evil is not a new theme. Scripture As Hidden Knowledge, Suppressed By Evil Leaders? Also not new. But writing about a society full of conscienceless New Age murderers completely unfamiliar with the basic ideas of Christianity — just two decades from today — requires a whiplash-inducing suspension of disbelief. At least Logan’s Run had the decency to set things jillions of years in the future.

All this is made worse by the fact that, well… The author’s a hack. The prose is painfully hilarious: editors usually cut down clucky description, but this stuff reads like they inserted more adjectives just for fun. It’s very, very easy to get lost reading just a few pages. Following the twists and turns of the run-on sentences is hard enough without Maddoux’s habit of doubling back and repeating the same chunk of description, with slight variations. It’s almost as if the author can’t remember what’s being said from time to time, and loops back on himself in an endless infinite spiral of repetition and monotony, cycling through the things written previously as if there was no end to it all in sight.

Seal of Gaia is bad. If you’ve got a taste for kitsch, it’s awesomely bad. But make no mistake — if you pick this up, you’ll never be the same. Left Behind will read like Hemmingway, and Pat Robertson’s mutterings about the Illuminati will sound downright sensible.