Lunching With the Antichrist

Lunching With the Antichrist, Michael Moorcock, Mark Ziesing Books, 1995

This is a related group of stories about the Von Bek family, and its various branches. They are a family who seem to move very easily between the realms of the normal and everyday to the strange and fantastic. The Von Bek's seem to have done it all, including standing at the gates of Heaven and Hell. These tales, which span the twentieth century, are about people looking for some kind of fulfillment in their lives, a Holy Grail.

A roadie drives around late 1960s England with a reincarnated Jimi Hendrix, who is not yet ready to reveal himself in public. Another story involves North Africa and a piece of human skin sent through the mail with a full color tattoo of a Tarot card, the Wheel of Fortune, on it. In Depression-era London, the vicar of a shabby parish suddenly becomes an urgent orator and proselytizer. Saying things of which the Church does not approve, he is branded the Clapham Antichrist. He becomes a sort of traveling preacher after being defrocked as a priest, and, after the war becomes a regular on TV intellectual shows, after which he disappears from public life.

In present-day Aswan, Egypt, a man goes to rescue his archaeologist sister, whose letters home got increasingly strange. Depending on who he talks to, she has become either a junior Mother Teresa or member of a UFO cult. The truth is actually much more fantastic.

These are first-rate contemporary stories with just enough weird in them, and they are well worth the reader's time.