Children of Chaos

Greg F. Gifune will soon take his rightful place among the finest dark suspense writers of our time. Of the novels of his I've read t Children of Chaos is his best to date.

Children is a Conradian novel--the effect of a single act on an entire lifetime--about three boys whose rainy night encounter with a strange man (or is he not a man at all?) and his subsequent death dictate the fate that will, thirty years later, bring Phil the writer to find his old friend and now insane cult leader Martin in an abandoned church in the dusty hell of he Mexican desert.

The quest in this heart of darkness is driven by guilt, grief and madness to the degree that Gifune shifts brilliantly from realism to phantasmagoria and back again. The portraits of the boys as adults are indelibly rendered, rich in detail and brutal in judgement.

The narrative keeps you turning the pages and the undertow of dread anticipates the stark crazed power of the end as it's played out in the hell of lost Mexico.

This is a novel that will stay with you a long, long time.