GROWING GENRE

An airline pilot who is feeling estranged from a wife he finds too religious suddenly has more than 100 passengers disappear from his plane, leaving behind their clothes, glasses and jewelry. Rayford Steele learns later that millions of people around the world have disappeared.

Had his wife been right when she warned him Judgment Day was coming?

So begins "Left Behind," the first in a series of apocalyptic novels about what happens to those bypassed by the Rapture, when true Christians ascend to heaven and those left behind must find salvation before Armageddon.

Combined sales of the six books by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye have topped 7.4 million. "Apollyon," the latest in the series, has been on The New York Times fiction best-seller list for months. It is the first Christian fiction book to crack a secular best-seller list.

The success of the series is indicative of the booming market for romance, mystery, historical fiction, juvenile novels and even science fiction books with a spiritual bent.

Lee Gessner, chief executive officer of Word Publishing in Nashville, said the phenomenon is similar to what has occurred with Christian music.

"Years ago, Christian music meant gospel music," Gessner said. "Today's Christian market is very different.

"You can get country, rap, R&B. For every kind of music found in the general culture, there is now a parallel in Christian music."

While there are no figures on sales of Christian fiction, Phyllis Tickle, a contributing religion editor at Publishers Weekly, said book distributors have posted huge increases in sales of religious books.

Ingram Book Group, the largest book distributor in the country, has seen a 500 percent increase in such sales since 1994, Tickle said.

"Since they're the largest, it's a bellwether," she said.

As sales have increased, publishers have devoted more time and money to Christian fiction. Word plans to spend $500,000 marketing "The Visitation," a thriller by Kellogg, Idaho, writer Frank Peretti released in May. The initial printing is 600,000 copies.

The book is about Travis Jordan, a burned-out former pastor struggling with doubts and disillusionment about his faith, his life and the death of his wife when a Messianic figure arrives in town to preach and heal.

Peretti, a former Pentecostal minister, said the marketing support for his new book is a far cry from that in 1986 for his first book, "This Present Darkness."

"I felt like a leper," he said.

Eventually, editors at Good News Crossways decided to take a chance and published it with almost no promotion. It went on to sell more than 2 million copies and is regarded by many as the book that proved there was a market for Christian fiction.

"This Present Darkness" is the story of a small-town newspaper editor who, with the help of a fundamentalist minister and invisible angels, battles an occult conspiracy led by a woman psychology professor and a legion of demons.

Peretti has written five adult novels and eight children's books that have sold a combined 8 million copies. His books have been compared with Stephen King's, but he said there is a major difference.

"In my books, God and angels are involved in the resolution," he said.

Peretti thinks Christian fiction has matured over the years, helping sales.

"The old way of writing was fairy tale. The characters were ideal," Peretti said. "Joe Christian always had an answer for everything. ... Just pray, and Jesus will solve all your problems.

"That's why nobody read it."

Now, he said, while Christian books still generally end happily, there are struggles within them, and bad things sometimes happen to good people.

Doug Ross, president and chief executive officer of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, said prior to Peretti, the only publisher with much success in the Christian fiction genre was Bethany House with the romances of author Janette Oke.

"Since evangelical houses didn't see much market or demand for fiction, they did a poor job of producing fiction. It was pretty insipid," said Ross, whose association's 222 members include virtually all the Christian publishers in the United States and some in other countries.

Association members now project an 8 percent annual sales growth, double what the American Association of Publishers projects.

Darren Sherkat, a Vanderbilt University professor of sociology who studies conservative Protestant culture, said the audience for Christian fiction always was there, but mainstream publishers decided decades ago that religion was taboo.

"It was partly a phobia of being considered anti-Semitic that drove Christianity out of the marketplace," Sherkat said.

The Rev. Andrew Greeley spurred some of the change in thinking in the 1970s and 1980s with books like "Cardinal Sins," about priests doing bad things. While some dismiss Greeley's books as potboilers, Sherkat said they helped show that religious books could sell.

"Religion is an important and central issue in people's lives," he said. "Even if you are not evangelical, you can't identify with fiction story lines that have no religion, where nobody prays, nobody goes to church."

Copyright 1999 Cowles Publishing Company
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.