by Ray Wallace



by Greg F. Gifune
Delirium Books

Greg Gifune’s Children of Chaos begins in the summer of 1978. The opening is told in a first person narrative from the perspective of a fourteen-year-old boy named Phillip Moretti. While walking home from a carnival one rain-soaked evening, he comes across a horribly scarred man with the word "Chaos" tattooed across his back who has set up camp at the edge of a dirt road. Overcoming his fear, Phillip falls into conversation with the man, questioning him on how it is he has come to be so disfigured. When Phillip’s friends Martin and Jamie arrive on the scene, the man’s scars begin to shift and realign themselves in a disturbing and wholly impossible way as Martin tells Phillip the news of a young girl’s brutal murder in town. Suspecting the scarred man of the crime, Martin takes a duffel bag from the man containing a strange book and an ornate sword. Lunging for the bag, the scarred man is attacked by the boys and accidentally killed by Martin and the sword in his hand. After disposing of the body, the three boys separate and head home, each haunted by the knowledge of what they have done. The years pass and the three friends drift apart but it is only a matter of time before the events of that evening, quite inevitably, bring them together once again.

Thirty years later we discover that Phillip is an alcoholic, a struggling writer, and the father of a teenage girl who lives with his ex-wife. After receiving a phone call from the ex informing him that their daughter has been involved in a car accident and taken to a local hospital, he finds to his great relief that she is relatively unharmed. Upon returning home he is met by an attractive woman waiting on him with a message from the mother of his childhood friend, Martin. He reluctantly agrees to visit with Martin’s ailing mother in the town of New Bethany where he and his friends grew up, where the scarred man’s death occurred, and where the old woman still lives. Once there, he is offered a substantial sum of money and is eventually coerced into taking a trip to Mexico where Martin has become the leader of a dangerous and locally feared blood cult. His mission is to bring Martin home to his terminally ill mother. Judging by the videotape he is shown in which the true depths of his friend’s madness can be seen, Phillip does not entertain any real hopes of his mission’s success. But in confronting Martin he does hope to put an end to the nightmares that haunt him and find a peace of mind and soul that has eluded him ever since that long-ago, dreadful night.

Phillip soon departs for California then crosses the border into Mexico where he heads for Tijuana. Once there, he encounters his childhood friend Jamie who has obviously suffered in his own way from the encounter with the scarred man. Now a defrocked priest, he lives in squalor, slave to a heroine habit and a lust for teenage girls. Jamie explains to Phillip the futility of his mission, how he will only find horror and death at the encampment where Martin and his group of followers live. His words do little to dissuade Phillip however and the following morning he sets out with a local guide and a couple of hired mercenaries along the next phase of the journey that will take him to Martin. The encampment resides at the end of a long, desolate, supposedly haunted stretch of desert road known as the Corridor of Demons. Along the way Phillip is forced to confront the possibility that the scarred man may not have actually been a man at all, that he may have been something much more, and that there could be some truth to the local legends describing Martin as a practitioner of black magic and an incarnation of the Antichrist.