In Evil Eternal, by Hunter Shea, the Biblical war between good and evil roars to a depraved crescendo in the post 9/11 world of politics and improbable love. Cain abuses and desecrates in his role as imposter-mayor. Father Micheal is the avenging angel, God's blind, towering, and immortal henchman. The backdrop is modern, but Cain and Father Micheal have been fighting for aeons. The collateral damage of their battles are countless mortals: Cain murders because he's evil incarnate, but Father Micheal murders to cleanse the souls of those those touched by Cain.

Father Micheal is as physically imposing as he is spiritually compelling. In a way, he is more frightening than Cain because he is the good guy, but he seems so inhuman, so cold, and so capable of murdering in the name of Good and Salvation. Over the course of the book, the human truth of Father Michael is revealed; he was not always a Holy soldier, but was once a man named Liam, beloved of Ailis, and father to Kerwynn. The events that took his family set him on the path to becoming an eternal force, but even that is frightening in the sense that it seems as though God has chosen to specially punish Liam, to dispense a special kind of hell-in-half-life to his devoted warrior. With Father Michael on the side of good, it doesn't take much to believe that true evil - the raw, everlasting evil embodied by Cain -must be incaculably horrific. Over and again, Shea gives us lurid and stomach-churning examples of Cain's moral blight. Still, it is the image of Father Micheal killing an entire village of people to free their immortal souls that stays with me. In the mythos of Evil Eternal, good doesn't mean nice. Good doesn't mean beautiful, loving, or even human. Good is simply a refusal to let Evil proceed without opposition.

In some sense, both Father Micheal and Cain are tragic figures because each is unable to love. Cain can't love because he has turned against God, and Father Micheal can't love because it weakens his defenses. Of the two, only Father Micheal's resolve is tested. For reasons he cannot fathom, Father Micheal is presented with the possibility of pulling his own, long-deceased Ailis into the modern times by sacrificing another woman. The pathos of Father Micheal's longing is the heart of the story, the center about which the final battle revolves. Like Shea's debut novel, Forest of Shadows, Evil Eternal is a story about love - eternal love.