Novel: Apollyon

Overview
Apollyon is the fifth installment in the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, continuing the saga of a world under the rule of Global Community potentate Nicolae Carpathia after the Rapture. The novel unfolds during the trumpet judgments of Revelation, zeroing in on the unleashing of Apollyon, Abaddon, the Destroyer, and the terrifying demonic locusts that torment all who lack God’s protective seal. Against this apocalyptic backdrop, the Tribulation Force struggles to survive, serve, and spread the gospel while the Antichrist consolidates power.

Setting and Stakes
The action pivots between New Babylon, Carpathia’s gleaming world capital, and Jerusalem, where millions converge as prophetic events accelerate. The first four trumpet judgments have already ravaged earth, sea, and sky, and now the fifth trumpet opens the abyss. The result is not just global calamity but a psychological and spiritual crucible: suffering descends selectively on unbelievers while believers with the divine seal move through a world in agony, marked and protected yet constantly hunted.

Key Plot Threads
The Tribulation Force, journalist Buck Williams, pilot Rayford Steele, Chloe Steele Williams, and scholar-evangelist Tsion Ben-Judah, faces peril on parallel fronts. Tsion organizes a massive convocation of believers in Jerusalem, an open-air declaration that Christ is Lord in the very city where the two witnesses preach and cannot be harmed. The gathering brings encouragement and conversions but also paints a target on the faithful as Global Community forces surveil, infiltrate, and threaten.

When the locust plague breaks, the contrast is stark: cities erupt in panic as the stinging torment drives the unsealed to despair, yet Buck and other believers can navigate the chaos. In one of the book’s tensest arcs, Chloe’s late-term pregnancy collides with the crisis, forcing Buck into desperate runs for medical help through streets filled with writhing victims. Their son’s birth becomes both a personal mercy and a symbol of fragile hope amid judgment.

Rayford, still piloting for Carpathia, fights an internal war. Daily proximity to the Antichrist fuels grief and anger, tempting him toward vigilantism even as he is reminded to wait on God’s timing. Hattie Durham, formerly Carpathia’s companion, wrestles with her pregnancy and her allegiance. Hovering between repentance and resentment, she becomes a mirror for the novel’s central question: whom will you trust when survival and soul seem at odds?

As the fifth trumpet’s five-month torment wanes, the sixth trumpet looms. Four bound angels are released at the Euphrates, and a vast demonic cavalry sweeps the globe, killing a third of humanity. The Global Community spins catastrophe as controllable crisis, but the scale of death erodes even the regime’s propaganda. The Tribulation Force scrambles to relocate personnel, shore up communications, and keep Tsion’s daily teachings streaming to a scattered underground church.

Themes and Tone
Apollyon juxtaposes judgment and mercy, terror and protection. The visible seal on believers, discernible to some, dramatizes the book’s insistence that identity in Christ is both shield and summons. Suffering divides rather than unites: hardened hearts curse God, while repentant hearts find courage and clarity. Domestic scenes, childbirth, prayer, conversation, sharpen the cosmic stakes by showing what faith costs and what it sustains.

Endgame
By the close, the world reels from unprecedented loss, Carpathia’s empire remains ruthless though rattled, and the Tribulation Force endures, bruised but emboldened. Rayford returns to duty with a simmering resolve, Buck and Chloe guard their newborn in a city of signs and wonders, and Tsion presses on with a message that grows louder as the darkness deepens. The Destroyer has been unleashed, but so has a fierce, defiant hope.