SECOND COMING

After apocalyptic floods, seven young adults find themselves drawn to a mountain paradise in Minster’s post-apocalyptic Christian novel.

Eight-year-old Gabriel Thomas prays to Santa Claus as he watches the world flood from inside his Pennsylvania school with other children with nowhere else to go. Suddenly, he’s filled with the Holy Spirit as God chooses him to lead an “Elect” few to paradise. Gabriel leads 11 other children, on God’s instructions, to establish a community on a nearby mountain while the world floods. Twenty years and a second flood later, the remains of humanity are mostly divided into the Elect on Spring Mountain and the cannibalistic Golgoths who terrorize survivors outside it. Seven young adults in the South all have the same dream, featuring Gabriel. In Alabama, Booker Bailey, a scholar, recently lost his parents to the Golgoths. Marshall Langar just discovered that his common-law wife aborted her pregnancy and wants him to leave their Tennessee cabin. In Georgia, Arabella Pendleman and Tatum Winters are convinced by the devout Christian Aliyah Freedman and Dodie Sealy to leave for Spring Mountain, and in Tennessee, Jayden Bonner, a musician and astrologer, does the same. The seven meet on the Appalachian Trail, evading Golgoths called north by their leader, Hostis Dei, in preparation for a final battle. Minster’s novel tells a religious tale of apocalypse in the style of the Left Behind series, and the plot is well paced and suspenseful. But it’s also an extremely violent narrative in which the threat of rape by the Golgoths is used constantly to heighten female characters’ distress. Throughout the novel, women immediately defer to men to make decisions. The atheistic Tatum, who “claimed to like girls more than boys,” meets the devout Marshall and is said to be “sanctified through her believing husband”: “Now she is a believer…and that beautiful bright light is pushing out all the old darkness,” says Jayden. While the book has many other short sermons throughout it, seemingly intended for non-Christians, the novel is likely to appeal only to those who already share the characters’ beliefs.

A briskly paced but sanctimonious and problematic adventure.