Just for fun: Having read the series through Assassins, I started compiling a list of the clichés that LaHaye and Jenkins have so far exploited.
The Hero Battle Death Exemption
This is a well-known action-hero convention in which heroes are far more durable than villains - it takes about ten times as much force to dispatch the hero as it does one of the evil characters. In Apollyon, one minor character is killed by a single bullet; in the same battle, Buck, one of the major protagonists, jumps from a Gulfstream jet travelling down the runway at takeoff speed and survives with a few scratches.
The Expendable Minor Character
Unless your name is Buck, Chloe, or Rayford, you should never join the Tribulation Force for the same reason that you should never beam down in a red shirt. You're toast. Apart from the three principal characters, who are indestructible, every character who joins the Trib Force dies within two novels of being introduced. (And yes, I've scanned the excerpt from The Remnant at leftbehind.com - Ray, Buck, and Chloe are all still going concerns, unlike most of their friends.)
The Patented LaHaye Suspense-Killing Convention.
This one is definitely peculiar to LaHaye. I mentioned previously how completely unthrilling these "thrillers" are, and the main reason for this is the PLSKC, which says essentially the following: At no time may the reader be surprised or kept in suspense; the plot must be rendered as predictable as possible. The PLSKC takes one of two forms:
The Gratuitous Suspense-Killing Plot Device. For example, at a time when "tribulation saints" are starting to be persecuted, leading to great suspense potential as our heroes might get infiltrated or caught somewhere that none of their friends can help them, LaHaye invokes the GSKPD and invents an invisible mark on the forehead that only other Christians can see. Now if you get in trouble, you only have to look for someone else with a cross on their forehead and get help. Suspense conveniently averted.
The Gratuitous Suspense-Killing Biblical Exposition. Suppose during the middle of The Empire Strikes Back, they had cut to a scene in George Lucas' office in which Lucas announced: "You'll really like the climax of this movie, because Luke and Darth Vader square off, Luke loses his hand and discovers that Vader is his father." The books are full of constant reminders of what LaHaye believes the Tribulation has in store, and so thanks to the GSKBE we're informed in advance that the 200,000,000 horsemen will ride, Little Nicky the Antichrist will get assassinated (he even tells us how that is accomplished, effectively killing the "whodunit" ending of Assassins) and will rise from the dead. Etc. etc. etc. Can't have the readers surprised now, can we? All this is accomplished either in offhand narrative comments or through the ponderous emails of Bible "expert" Tsion Ben-Judah who I really wish would die horribly.
