Emily Johnston, a college sophomore, wasn't seeking salvation. She just wanted to read a novel that a classmate had lent to her.

So on a cool night in October 1998, the aspiring artist from Charlotte, North Carolina, settled into her dorm room at Sweetbriar College, planning to skim the prologue to Left Behind. Then she would study for two exams scheduled for the next day.

By sunrise, she hadn't completed a lick of her studies, but she had finished the 468-page end-times novel. At breakfast, she told her astonished friend that she was going out that day to buy the second book.

And to the eternal delight of her friend, Emily announced she now knew Jesus. "One night we had been talking about her beliefs," Emily says in reflection. "I'd never gone to church in my life. I was of the opinion that if God was going to accept me, he would accept me whether or not I went to church. My parents were pretty much open-minded. They wanted us to decide what we were going to do. They were of the opinion that if we were Buddhists or Jewish ? they would support us."

After she read Left Behind, she says, she understood for the first time that Jesus Christ is the only way to God and to eternal life in heaven.

The letter she wrote to authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins about the impact of their work is typical of the thousands they have received. Their Left Behind fiction series, about life on earth after the rapture, when Christ takes believers to heaven, has attracted millions of fans.

Last-days yarns have been spun before, from speculative/prophetic books like Hal Lindsey's best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) to Larry Norman's Jesus-rock ballad "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" on the album Only Visiting This Planet (1972). End-times novels have been written recently by people like Christian financial adviser Larry Burkett, Christian psychiatrist Paul Meier, and novelist Randy Alcorn. But never have the mysteries of Revelation been examined at greater length or in more white-knuckle detail than in the hit series that began with the book Left Behind, published in 1995 by Tyndale House.

What started as a trilogy, expanded into seven books, and now is projected to be a 12-volume series. Assassins, No. 6 in the series, hit bookstores in August; the last book won't be published until late 2002. Jerry Jenkins, who does the writing, has stepped up his pace to two books a year. (In the tradition of Star Wars, the authors now are considering writing a prequel. Also, Namesake Entertainment plans to release a movie based on Left Behind in September 2000.)

Since the publication of Left Behind, millions of readers have been captivated by the adventures of pilot Rayford Steele, his daughter Chloe, reporter Buck Williams, and Rayford's new wife Amanda. (Rayford's first wife?a believer?was taken up in the rapture.) The 7.4 million adult books LaHaye and Jenkins have sold as of August put them in league with authors like John Grisham and Stephen King, without a single plug from Oprah Winfrey.

The sales and impact of the books have been so notable that even People magazine and a front-page story in The New York Times gave them positive ink last year.