he has miraculously acquired the power to heal the
sick with a touch and even to raise the dead. Al-
though his parishioners believe this to be divine in-
tervention, he has reservations about using this new
talent, a hesitation shared by his superiors in the
Roman Catholic Church. The significance of the
miracles is underscored by the imminent coming of
the millennium, now past, and the atmosphere of
growing fear and uncertainty is marvelously well de-
veloped. Monteleone had clearly found a type of
story he could write exceptionally well, and most of
his subsequent work similarly mixed the supernatu-
ral with religious concerns.
The Resurrectionist(1995) makes use of a simi-
lar theme. This time a charismatic politician sur-
vives a plane crash and emerges with the power to
restore the dead to life. The story develops with
very understated melodrama, as the miraculous gift
proves to be something of a curse. The politician’s
career is over because of the controversy surround-
ing him, and certain elements within the govern-
ment plot to make use of his abilities to advance
their own personal agendas. Night of Broken Souls
(1997) is more consciously a thriller. Several peo-
ple begin to experience vivid dreams of their for-
mer lives as prisoners in Nazi concentration camps,
which turns out to be a foreshadowing of the secre-
tive series of murders carried out by a former war
criminal.
The Reckoning(1999) is a sequel to Blood of
the Lamb.The new pope is actually the Antichrist
and is using his authority to destroy or neutralize
all the holy artifacts that might be used against
him when he moves openly against the world. The
scale this time is much wider, but Monteleone’s
writing skills had improved dramatically during
the 1990s, and he delivers a taut, sometimes
frightening story. His most recent novel is Eyes of
the Virgin (2002), another thriller in which a
woman falsely accused of murder is enlisted in an
effort to retrieve an artifact that could allow direct
communication with God.
Monteleone is also the editor of the highly re-
garded Borderlands anthology series and edited the
later volumes jointly with his wife, Elizabeth Mon-
teleone. He founded Borderlands Press, which spe-
cializes in horror fiction. Many of his short science
fiction stories have been collected, but his short
horror fiction, unaccountably, has yet to be gath-
ered together in book form.Moorcock, Michael(1939– )
Michael Moorcock has long been one of the lead-
ing writers in modern science fiction and fantasy,
having won major awards in both fields. He is also
one of the hardest to categorize because of his con-
cept of the Multiverse, a greater universe that in-
cludes our own and effectively infinite numbers of
alternate realities, in some of which magic is real,
blending science fiction and fantasy unpredictably.
As part of that concept, he has developed the idea
of the Eternal Champion, a hero who arises in dif-
ferent times and in different universes, always re-
sponding when the forces of evil or chaos threaten.
Most of his heroes are manifestations of the same
personality, sometimes with very similar names,
whether they be Jherek Carnelian, Jerry Cornelius,
or Elric of Melnibone. The first part of Moorcock’s
career in fantasy was primarily sword and sorcery
tales, at which he proved his mastery quite early,
and his various champions usually prevail through
force of arms and the exercise of quick wits in a
crisis. In recent years his fantasy has taken on a
more literary flavor, and most of the trappings of
sword and sorcery have been abandoned. Now his
champions use reason, personal loyalty, and careful
planning to outwit the villains.
Over the years Moorcock has revised novels,
retitled novels, and shuffled the contents of short
story collections so that it is very difficult in some
of his subsidiary series to definitively list the titles
in anything approximating the proper order. He
began writing in the 1950s but only became signifi-
cant and prolific during the 1960s, after which he
produced a large amount of both science fiction
and fantasy as well as thrillers and contemporary
fiction. He also edited the very influential British
science fiction magazine New Worldsand several
anthologies and used at least three pseudonyms,
almost always for science fiction. Sojan(1977) col-
lects some of his earliest short fantasy work.
Moorcock’s first major fantasy hero was Elric,
still his most famous character. Elric appeared ini-
tially in a series of short adventures, an atypical
hero in a barbaric world. He is an albino and notMoorcock, Michael 245