The publisher’s blurb claims that this novel “graphically portrays how Satanism has infiltrated our culture through music, medicine, education, the media, and in many more subtle ways.” While the story clearly contains no objective facts regarding the Satanic conspiracy it alleges to dramatize, it does form an interesting case study in psychosocial projection. The Satanists are portrayed as focusing their efforts on raising a generation of indoctrinated drones, recruiting them from
• children whom their parents wanted to abort,
• Satanically-dominated day care centers, and
• Satanic infiltration of public schools.

I have yet to see any evidence of Satanism on those three fronts, but it does not escape my notice that evangelical Christians are perennially interested in those venues for the indoctrination of children with the worship of their Jehovah-Jesus caricatures.

Similarly, the Satanically-inspired New Age movement is supposed to be based on promises of “rebirth without a great deal of anxiety”—which is exactly how the individuals “saved” in the novel experience their conversions to Christianity. Oh, there’s anxiety about the Satanic hordes of course, but not about Jesus! Just desperate contempt transformed to insipid reverence.

Temple of Set founder Michael Aquino is an offstage presence in the narrative, invoked as “Martin Andreno…the top Satanist in the nation.” And the author, writing in 1991 e.v., assures the reader through the voice of a repentant New Age guru, “By the year 2000, they will have everyone who hasn’t become a Satanist living in moment-by-moment fear of their lives.”

Predictably, the Christian heroes of the text are given plenty of opportunity to express their abhorrence of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. In an unexpected piece of dialogue, the protagonist and an arch-Satanist discuss atheism, with the pastor-hero defending the moral sensibility of atheists, and the Satanist deriding them for “having no belief at all.” Author Elwood seems to have misplaced his Christian evangelical script, in which atheists are tools of Satan.

Bewildering indeed is the novel’s climax, in which a Native American, recently converted to Christianity and armed with a bow and arrow(!), serves as emergency reinforcements for the hero, in a pyrrhic attempt to rescue the Indian’s own son from crucifixion by Satanists.

Observing the commercial success of the Left Behind novels, I can only hope that the last two decades have seen improvements in the standard for pop-Christian evangelical paranoid fantasy stories.