I Can't Believe It's Not Kingdom Come (1)
Chapter 1 of the crime comedy from Chris Well. When the world fails to end on schedule, the mob is in no mood to discuss End-Times theology...
PREVIEW VIDEO
You can listen to the author commentary for this chapter here. (Don’t worry, no spoilers!)
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Kingdom Come
[Originally published as Tribulation House]
It’s not the end of the world—which could be a problem.
“Laugh out loud …delightful satire of the underworld and the evangelical world” (Publishers Weekly)
Serialized every Thursday and Saturday on Substack. Links emailed out once a week in our weekly Monster Complex™ newsletter!
- 1 -
I might as well just tell you right now, I killed Reverend Daniel Glory. Back there at the church, in his study.
But this is my story. Don’t let anyone tell you different. My dad always said we all write our own story. Of course, I guess that’s why it worked out so well for him.
Why did I kill Reverend Daniel Glory? Sure, it was an accident. More or less. At least, I think it was.
I don’t know, we were arguing about the Rapture and it kind of got out of hand and then I just—
Wait. I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up.
This all started about five months ago, when Reverend Daniel Glory told us we needed to do our Kingdom Come earlier than—
Oh. Wait.
Okay, I guess this actually started last year when Marvin Dobbs left the church. Our church. The Last Church of God’s Imminent Will.
A year ago, last summer, Marvin left with some of the other families to start a new church. And he took his Armageddon House multimedia show with him.
You do know about Armageddon House, right? Every Halloween for the past three or four years, Marvin and our team put together a special multimedia presentation explaining the Great Tribulation, which ends with the Battle of Armageddon.
Wait—you don’t know about the Great Tribulation? It’s that seven-year period between the Rapture and the Triumphant Return of Jesus Christ, as described in the prophecies of Daniel and Ezekiel and the apostles Paul and John. After the Lord Jesus takes His Bride home, there are going to be seven years of horrible judgment inflicted on those who are left b—
What? The murder of Reverend Glory? I’m getting to that.
Well, anyway, when Marvin left to form his little offshoot splinter group, we discovered he had actually trademarked the name “Armageddon House.” Imagine that.
When the board at church met to discuss the matter, we considered doing Armageddon House anyway without him. Just reconstruct it from memory and copy or use materials from previous years. Use the same name, business as usual. Just ignore the cease-and-desist letter, let God and His angels work that out.
But we decided we didn’t want to be associated with Armageddon House anymore. I mean, if Marvin and his new “fellowship” planned to stage their own Armageddon House, the risk of confusion in the marketplace was enough to rebuild ours as a brand-new event.
Which is how we ended up with Kingdom Come. It was an opportunity for a new beginning.
We sat down and worked through the whole grid. Instead of imagining how to simply explain or show a picture of each bowl of wrath and each trumpet of judgment, we created an entire theatrical event.
Yeah, we could have set up the charts and graphs and the overhead projector. But today’s audience, this last generation, they’re kind of jaded about flannelgraph presentations, know what I mean?
These kids today, with their SpongeBob SquarePants and their American Idol and their Stranger Things, they need the bells and whistles and the like.
They don’t need a lot of explanation. They need a demonstration.
You see, that was the challenge. It’s one thing to say “the moon was blackened” or “the waters turned to blood” or “men were stung by enormous flying scorpions”—but how do you make it happen right here, right before their eyes?
In the end, we created Kingdom Come: A full-sensory immersive, interactive, theatrical evangelistic event that simulates what it will actually be like to live through the events of the Great Tribulation. An entire full-service prophetic experience.
You’d be surprised how much of it we accomplished with sound and light. We developed the various rooms throughout the church basement. Some college kids created soundscapes for each event. We wrote up a full script for the actors; they played everything from people caught up in the events, to the world armies fighting the Most Holy, to the father of lies himself, bound and thrown into the pit for a millennium.
The murder of Reverend Glory? I’m getting to that.
So we were working out the blueprints for creating our Kingdom Come presentation as a major theatrical evangelistic full-sensory ministry outreach. We had debated the merits of various slogans for the event—the leading contenders were…
· WE’LL SCARE THE HELL OUT OF YOU
· GET RIGHT OR GET LEFT
· THE TIME IS CLOSER THAN YOU THINK
While the first slogan was a favorite of several board members for its bracing, truthful stance, in the end we worried that the neighbors would misunderstand. So, we went with the second slogan, for its simple, instructional message.
And I remember the meeting where our chief carpenter, Bill Broadstreet, was giving us his estimate for the physical construction to be done on the project. Suddenly, Reverend Daniel Glory burst in with some news.
“Friends!” There was a glow on the Reverend’s face unlike we had ever seen before. The man stood there in the doorway to the church basement, leaning against the doorframe, wheezing to catch his breath. “Jesus is coming back!”
The room was silent. We all stared. At first, we wondered why he was saying this right then. After all, he preached on this topic every week. But then he dropped the bomb: “And I know when!”
Okay, that was a new one. Collectively, everyone in the room gasped. One of us, I don’t even remember who it was, asked, “When, Reverend?”
“October 17.”
Five months.
“5:51 AM.” Reverend Glory waved the papers clutched in his hand. Later, I would wonder what he was waving at us. His Bible study? His calculations?
All I know is he grinned from ear to ear and said, “The Rapture is going to happen at 5:51 AM on October 17.”
Everyone around the meeting table reacted differently. Some were stunned into silence, others screamed with joy. One noisy woman loudly sobbed and clapped.
Reverend Glory, aglow with thrill and exhaustion, dragged a chair from the wall over to our table. “I now have incontrovertible proof that the Rapture takes place this coming October.”
I’m sure I grinned bigger than anyone in the room. “What reason do you have to say that?”
Reverend Daniel Glory looked at me and winked. “Why stop with one reason, boy? I got one hundred and seven of ’em!”
Of course, you know what this meant. We were going to have to step up the production of Kingdom Come.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY:
The original version of this novel, published in 2007 as TRIBULATION HOUSE, was the third book in a loosely connected series labeled the Kansas City Blues. Earlier, when the publisher had bought my debut novel, 2005’s FORGIVING SOLOMON LONG, my original plan was for that to be a standalone book.
But the publisher offered me a contract for multiple books—with their intention that this book would kick off a series. However, at that point of the writing process, all the characters in FORGIVING SOLOMON LONG were either professional criminals, or victims, or innocent bystanders. And many of those characters were dead by the end of the book. The manuscript did not lend itself to a continuation.
So, to make a series possible, I added some new characters who could still be alive at the end. These were cops and FBI agents, members of a joint task force fighting organized crime. And once I added them to the story, I then had characters in the first book who could show up in follow-up novels.
When I wrote the second and the third book in that series, I focused again mostly on the criminals and the victims and the like—and the characters of Griggs and Pasch and their law enforcement co-workers were mostly there to offer a bit of continuity.
Which brings us to I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT KINGDOM COME. Which was originally written as the third book in that series. But the reason it can stand alone here is that most of the story is about people who are only in this book. But when you see Griggs and Pasch, know that there were other stories about them, too.
Now, it’s possible that the way you got here is through the stuff I write for my website Monster Complex. Which is one reason that I jumped to this book for serializing here—because while it is mostly a crime novel and technically not a speculative novel, it does include characters who speculate.
That is, one of the angles of I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT KINGDOM COME is there are people in the novel who are discussing their different views about the possible end of the world. They’re speculating. And some of those views are based on certain interpretations of religious text.
In fact, they are arguing about what has been called the End-Times. And out here in the real world, there are people who believe these End-Times are definitely a part of our future—and there are people out here who believe these End-Times are just another plot device like you would see in a book or movie.
And what gave me the idea for this novel was the question of how can that religious debate spark a murder?
Hopefully, you’ll stick around for future chapters and we can all see my speculations about how that might turn out.
There are 70 chapters in I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT KINGDOM COME. My plan is to post a chapter every Thursday and Saturday on Substack.
SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR A WEEKLY NOTICE WITH LINKS (IN MY REGULAR MONSTER COMPLEX NEWSLETTER)
If you can’t wait to see how it turns out, you can actually read the whole eBook (as TRIBULATION HOUSE: RELOADED) on Wattpad.
Chris Well has been a writer pretty much his entire life. Over the years, he’s worked in newspapers, magazines, radio, and books. Now the chief of the website Monster Complex™, he celebrates monster stories in classic fiction and pop culture. He has also started writing horror comedy stories that embrace Universal Monsters, 1960s sitcoms, 1980s action movies, The X-Files, and Marvel Comics.
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