The Last Day

Rating:
Summary: Pleasantly Surprised
Review: I bought this book after reading the reviews, which are quite strong, and being a skeptic, read this with a critical eye. Nevertheless, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this novel. It held my suspense from the very beginning, is far more complex and intriguing than most suspense thrillers, and kept building as I went. By the time I was halfway through, I found myself thinking about it even when I wasn't reading it, to the point it became a near obsession. Like the best books, when I finished it, I was both thrilled and sad. Thrilled at a story that surpassed my expectations by far, sad for it to end. I'd like to read more from this author, and hope a sequel is in the offing. I can give THE LAST DAY my highest endorsement. An exceptional, intelligent, fascinating story.

Rating:
Summary: A real rush!
Review: If you're even remotely familiar with endtime novels, there is nothing at all that will surprise you here or make you think about religion in new way. I agree with the readers who recomend We All Fall Down instead. Mr. Caldwell does a much better job then Kleier with the subject matter

Rating:
Summary: Okay Thriller
Review: Dated now but still an okay thriller centering around the Milennium craze and the the Second Coming. Jesus returns as Jeza (a New Age Feminist!)and the rest of the plot is incidental and pretty darn familiar to readers of this kind of thing. I enjoyed some of this but it is overlong and preachy. The characters (especially the villains) are silly and their actions incredible. Jeza, however, is a hoot! You have to read some of her parables because they are priceless as Politically Correct versions of creaky old bible favorites. This is actually on sale for 1 cent through Amazon.com so what have you got to lose except hours of your life?

Rating:
Summary: A gutsy, gripping novel of religious intrigue
Review: Kleier posits that a new Messiah (this time God's only begotten daughter) comes to Earth to give the world a 2000 year spiritual tune up. So, how do "Jeza's" teachings boil down theologically? Basically, she preaches the gospel of late twentieth-century American political correctness. Sexism is so bad that it deserves an eleventh commandment:

'Thou shall honor woman as thy equal; and thou shall cherish her in unity with thy fellow man.' (Apotheosis 25:15) (p. 402)

(In all fairness to Kleier, I should probably point out that he doesn't normally have Jeza speak in such a poor mimicry of seventeenth-century English.) To the Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, Jeza says, essentially, "You're basically the same, so why can't you get along?" She teaches that all religions are equally ways to God, but opposes organised religion, and teaches that each person must look within for their personal path to God. (The "New Age" elements of this are fairly obvious, but so is the complaint of the spiritually apathetic that they believe in God, but don't like "organised religion." That, in turn, reminds me of the quote attributed to Teresa Nielsen Hayden, "Makes me wonder what's so great about incoherent religion.")

So how do the organised religions react to this, as it were, Reformation? Several groups are specifically named, such as the Roman Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Seventh Day Adventists. (Unfortunately for his case, Kleier confuses the teachings of the last two mentioned.) Other groups are lumped together under general terms of "millenarians" and "evangelicals" (a term of which Kleier demonstrates no real understanding), and a fictional preacher stands in for the whole wide variety of televangelists. As you might expect, the televangelist is portrayed as a money-grubber who will do anything to keep his receipts up, but it is the Catholics who come in for the biggest roasting. At one point, Jeza leads a troupe of reporters into the deepest, darkest, depths of the Vatican's top secret archives, where she tells them exactly which files to look at to reveal the deepest, darkest, most incriminating secret that the Vatican has been hiding all these years, namely that the Roman Catholic church has a pile of money. That might seem kind of anti-climactic: Kleier leads up right up to the threshold of all the Vatican conspiracy theories, and the worst he can come up with is that the Pope is loaded? But Jeza (and presumably Kleier) seems to see the only worth of any religious institution as a charitable organisation, and thus any resources which are not being used specifically for charitable purposes are a violation of that. In short, what it all boils down to is a secular view of religion: Jesus is okay as a moral teacher (at least as long as He sticks to telling people to be nice to one another, and doesn't actually condemn sins I like to commit), but any notion of Jesus as Redeemer is not on, because that implies sins from which we need to be redeemed, and that in turn implies moral absolutes, and we simply can't allow that.