The Last Christian Book

I stopped reading this book when I realized that the only reason I was still going was to collect quotes with which to write a scathing review. That seems like a terrible reason to keep reading a book so, about 2/3rds of the way through, I gave up.

This book has a solid plot setup and could easily have been made into a good sci-fi thriller, even if (for someone who reads sci-fi as much as I do) the basic layout was pretty boilerplate. The problem is that this is message fiction. The plot and the characters are just an excuse to peddle a very particular brand of Christianity which I find incredibly off-putting.

I think if I had agreed with the message, I would have found the book a little less unpleasant. But it didn't even have that going for it.

In terms of writing, the biggest problem is that there just aren't any characters in this book. There are only sock puppets and straw men. Even by those standards, however, they are still shallow. It's bad enough to read a thinly veiled lecture. It's much worse for the lecture to take itself seriously as some kind of counter-cultural ensign when it's really just a vapid collection of platitudes.

I'm still vaguely curious to know how it ends, however. Which goes to show you the potential that could have been here if David Gregory had put any effort into making his characters have any internal lives whatsoever. Instead we get a stereotypical knee-jerk Christian who is literally incapable of doubt or nuance in any meaningful sense (these are apparently virtues in Gregory's mind) and a scholar of Christianity who has all the depth and incision of an Internet troll, plus a few random one-dimensional bad guys of varying degrees of evil to keep the plot running.

Oh well.