Judgment Day

At the start of David's bloated, near-future SF novel, the first in a new Christian apocalyptic series, a God-given breakthrough in engine design allows a 20-year-old religious cult, the Fellowship of the Faithful, to launch a spacecraft, Rising Savior, from the town of Christ's Home, Calif. In two years, the Faithful achieve a near-monopoly on space, threatened only by a counter-cult of blood-sacrificing Luciferians led by Manuel Crow, a former funeral parlor magnate who has ""served the master of the underworld"" for the same two decades. To escape Crow and the thousand-year Satanic reign he's engineering from his seat in Congress, Faithful leader Ira Breitling shepherds his flock to Planet America, where they battle for humanity's very soul. Filled with cliched situations drawn from tabloid headlines, the book at times reads like a parody. Wooden dialogue, predictable plot machinations, heavy-handed dogma (both Christian and demonic) and two verging-on-one-dimensional characters leave little opportunity for spiritual uplift. Even though, by the merciful end, David has doggedly pulled out comic-book stops like deep-space booby traps, lethal asteroids and kamikaze spheres for spaceship destruction, his soggy space opera can barely manage a closing whimper. Agent, Carol McCleary. $75,000 national marketing campaign.