It�s depressing to be rising up into the air, or singing with the redeemed on the sea of glass, and then to realize you�re not in heaven, it�s the last page of yet another apocalyptic novel, and you have a review to write for Monday. But I�ll try to get my feet back on the ground and talk about Eleventh Hour and Midnight Hour, a two-punch package by C�leste perrino Walker and Eric Stoffle.

Eleventh Hour starts out on November 9 of an unspecified year in the near future, and ends on November 19, with each of 11 chapters covering a day. Midnight Hour picks right up with November 20 to 29, skips forward to March 3 to 6, and finishes with chapters titled �Last Days� and �Seconds to Midnight.� Like other apocalyptic novels, they present a number of good and bad characters and a few undecideds in a setting that quickly moves from life-as-we-know-it to a series of natural disasters and transforming political events, ending with the good characters (members of the outlawed Remnant Church) rising up to meet their Lord in the air while the wicked suffer various forms of self-inflicted doom.

With so many predetermined elements, it might seem like a piece of cake to write such a novel. Not so. Whereas most good novels are written out of the author�s transformed experience, the apocalyptic novel deals with many scenarios the authors can only imagine. Additional complications are added by depicting characters outside the normal sphere of author access�in the present novels that would probably include the U.S. president, the pope, the director of the FBI, and the hypocritical leader of a national religious coalition. A final challenge is added by having a large number of major characters and settings that must be juggled constantly in front of the reader.

Eleventh Hour and Midnight Hour struggle mightily against these challenges, but it is a struggle. I counted 74 named characters in Eleventh Hour. The reader has a lot to keep track of, and in the early going one doesn�t know that Wilma Blaine, Edward, and Fran�ois will never be mentioned again, while Dani Talbot and Dietrich will be with us even unto the end of the age. The dozen or so major characters, while giving the novel a certain breadth, notably limit the depth with which any character can be treated. Thus, while there are many potentially significant situations�a father and daughter who love each other but can�t get along; a man who doesn�t spend enough time with his family and is compromising his ethics by remaining in his job; a romance (if you hang in for Volume II)�the people in these situations were not given enough texture to make the situations really matter. For comparison, Pride and Prejudice, a longer book than Eleventh Hour, has about 35 named characters, and Elizabeth Bennet, the main character, is in almost every scene.

One of the authors (or was it a team effort?) depended heavily on football similes. I accepted that the carpet in Gavin�s office �bounced back like the Dallas Cowboys football team,� and that Brian, looking intently at Randy, �bent over like a football player huddling up to get a play.� But I was annoyed when Randy, who has just been in a car crash and diving underwater to see if bombs are attached to a bus�s underside, is described as sprinting �with the speed of an NFL wide receiver up the aisle� of the bus to tackle a terrorist. The last straw came when Randy, near the end of this saga, leaps over an altar where a baby is about to be sacrificed and catches the baby in midair, �clutching [the little fellow] like a football.� I don�t have space to discuss the telephone ring that �pierced the morning like a Confederate battle charge,� or the villain�s hands above his IBM Thinkpad: �Long, cruel fingers were poised over the keys like cobras, striking with lightning swiftness.� The images are certainly colorful, if not always well adapted to the situation.

On the positive side, it�s interesting to read that there is a woman president, a Vietnam Women�s Memorial, women FBI agents and medical researchers. Some significant research apparently went into presenting a credible Ebola-type virus for a national epidemic. And character treatment improved in the second volume, where far fewer new characters are introduced. Despite some literary shortcomings, these books will probably succeed in getting readers to seek out biblical truth more seriously, and whether or not our generation experiences the time of the end, that process will be a good thing.

Project Sunlight
June Strong, Review and Herald Publishing Association, Hagerstown, Maryland, 1999 (originally published by Southern Publishing Assn., 1980), 157 pages, US$1.99; Can$2.99, paper.

Project Sunlight, still in print 20 years after its original publication, is �written� by an angel on special assignment. The book records part of the life of one earthling, �Sunlight,� as a series of dialogues between Sunlight and her circle: children, neighbors, ex-husband, boyfriend, and others. Much of the book consists of Bible study, as Sunlight and her friends, mostly new to the Scriptures, search for answers to life�s problems. Author June Strong makes liberal use of biblical quotation and more than 100 references to specific texts in a short book.

It might seem self-serving that the characters adopt many important Adventist doctrines from �impartial� study of the Bible�including beliefs about the state of the dead, the Sabbath, health principles, and end-time prophecies�while the name �Seventh-day Adventist� is never used (there is one brief mention of The Great Controversy). To the cynics�including the cynical side of myself!�

I would respond that Project Sunlight consistently refers to the Bible for every belief offered, not to special books or sources of Adventist doctrine.

The characters create some interest, but dramatic propriety is sometimes strained to create an efficient presentation of biblical truth. Some readers may be annoyed, as I was, by the recording angel�s decision to assign the name �Sunlight� to the main character, even though he could easily have called her by her earth name, as he does every other character�though perhaps Project Meg wouldn�t have made a very catchy title.

The cover of the new edition of Project Sunlight has some interesting differences from the cover of my twenty-year-old edition. Sunlight�s clothes, the type font, and the cars in the background have all been updated, but the most interesting change is in Sunlight herself. The new Sunlight looks African-American, perhaps with a touch of Asian blood�a multicultural Sunlight. The author�s original preface calls Sunlight �a composite of us all.� It is a sign of the times that this �composite� has changed colors in the past 20 years.

Project Sunlight barely touches on the outside world and events of the time of trouble�in contrast to The Orion Conspiracy, If Tomorrow Comes, and Eleventh Hour/Midnight Hour. In the last months before Christ�s coming, Sunlight and friends live in an isolated cabin, hearing only occasional reports of outside news. A pack of police officers break in on the snowbound cabin a couple pages before Christ�s return and prepare to execute the faithful, but the drama is mostly confined to exciting discoveries in the Bible. Project Sunlight is good at what it does: presenting Bible study and �end-time� truths within a mildly dramatic context. It is not, primarily, an attempt to dramatize living in the last days.

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NOTE: In the January 18, 2001, issue of Adventist Review readers can find more reviews of fictionalized end-time books written by Seventh-day Adventists. Would any of them make a good movie? Send your selection to Letters to the Editor and tell us why.