Chris Pennington’s “Rapture’s Rain”

Jason Stover is a high school physics teacher living with his wife Kristina and daughter Nikki in Lake Royale, North Carolina. They have a good life. Jason is even becoming interested in his wife’s faith, and has been attending a Bible study with several friends from church.

Then comes the day he walking in his yard, and the air cracks and sizzles. Jason wakes up a day later, still in the yard, and goes looking for his family. But they’ve vanished. So have most of the other members of their Bible study. So have a lot of people.

Jason does find some of his friends, and together they begin to try to understand what’s happened. People all over the world are reported missing. Some are saying the vanishings suggest the rapture in the Bible. Jason and his friend begin to map it out. It looks like it might be that, but there are still unknowns.

Law and order begin to break down. A second physical disruption happens. And Jason begins to realize the planet is losing power, and that food no longer had the nutritional value it did before. Earth is dying, and the people left are dying with it.

This is the story of Rapture’s Rain by Chris Pennington.

I usually don’t read apocalyptic literature. I never read any of the Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. But I read Rapture’s Rain, and I kept reading through workouts on the elliptical and treadmill at the gym, while waiting for my computer to power up, and at night before I went to bed. I read it almost straight through. It’s a riveting story.

But more than that, it is also (surprisingly) realistic. Instead of describing the “macro” viewpoint of what’s happening in the world, Pennington focuses on the up close and personal, the “micro” view of what happens to ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. And questions of faith – and what happens to faith – abound.

Thoroughly engaging, Rapture’s Rain is also, simply a good story.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.