About a month or so after being hired, I was assigned the awesome job of re-arranging the entire Religion section. All the Bibles, all the Christian Inspiration, all the Christian Fiction, all the Jewish, Hindu, Atheist, Muslim, etc...everything needed to be arranged and spread out to new shelving in order to make room for new product. So, over the course of two or three shifts, I became very, very, VERY familiar with a lot of books I had never crossed (zing!) paths with prior to this.
One of those books was a bestseller entitled, 90 Minutes in Heaven.
You see, this guy was in a horrible car accident. Died. Went to Heaven for 90 minutes (I guess they have clocks in Heaven) and then woke up alive? Oh, AND THEN decided to write a book about it. And it sold a shitton. (That's a lot)
But that book came out in 2004.
A couple months ago, I started getting lots of people coming in asking about, "This book about a kid who went to Heaven and came back..." and I'd tell them, "Oh you mean 90 Minutes in Heaven," as I walk them over to the Religion section. But they'd stop me and go, "No, I already read that one, this one is about a kid in a wheelchair!"
Yes, there's apparently another book about going to Heaven and coming back. So, I made a mental note and went about my days working and sorting books. Then, around November, a new round of customers came in looking for, "This book about a kid who went to Heaven and came back!" As I go to grab "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven" they stop me and say, "No, I already read that one, this kid isn't in a wheelchair!"
Ugh. Heaven is for Real! Soooooo, TWO books about children going to Heaven and coming back come out within months of each other?! Seriously?! I know I'm a cynical asshole, but c'mon!!! You got to admit that's pretty far fetched...even if you believe in Heaven and religion in general.
But, my absolute favorite is a guy who wrote a book not about going to Heaven and back, but HELL!!!
He even wrote an amazing follow up entitled, 23 Questions About Hell which answers incredibly complex questions such as, "Isn't God mean for making Hell?" and explaining that Hell is actually within the center of the Earth. Yeah, you didn't know that?! Hell is exactly 3,700 miles underneath the Earth's center. Which means we can totally go visit if we just dig deep enough!
Oh, and course all of these books are located in the Christian Inspiration section, not Christian Fiction...
