"I spent a lot of time thinking about contemporary Christianity, and obviously the rapture kept coming up."

"My first impulse was ... to laugh it off — it's sort of a funny idea, people just floating away. But I kept thinking: What if it did happen? ... I thought, I'm such a skeptic that even if it did happen, I would resist the implications of it, and I also thought that three years later, everyone would have forgotten about it. No matter what horrible thing happens in the world, the culture seems to move on."

Tom Perrotta, author of "Election" (which was made into a terrific movie) has written a novel about life after the rapture called "The Leftovers." Obviously, there's a big fiction genre on this subject, so what's interesting here is that a literary (as they say) novelist is applying his mind and methods to the Rapture.

Listen to the audio at the link. He's extremely insightful. I'm going to read the book. (Use my links please if you feel like buying it too.) Perhaps it irks you to think of a fancy "literary" writer — with access to NPR promotion — appropriating the material that "genre" writers have made their own. But if you listen to the interview, you'll see that he's not full of himself and not disrespectful toward those other writers. He seems genuinely interested in exploring the idea.