From a rising horror novelist - a Stephen King/ Clive Barker amalgam, if you will - comes this novel of genetic experimentation and bloodshed wrought under the guise of salvation. A series of murders brings together Tony Garwood, an ex-San Diego police officer, and Deborah Kosarek, a technical writer at a center for biomedical research. They discover the murders are in fact a field test for genetically engineered shape-shifting humanoid creatures - the children of the title, otherwise known as "Loners" - bred to hunt humans as a means of population control. Their creator is Kosarek's reclusive employer, a Nobel-laureate geneticist and a zealot who views overpopulation as the root of all Earth's evils, and the result of the Loners' work as a latter-day equivalent of the great flood of biblical times. Now the Loners develop unplanned-for intelligence and a quasi-religious vision of their own - that Earth, without human beings, is their Promised Land - and Garwood and Kosarek may be the only people left who can stop the all but indestructible creatures from exterminating the human race in their own grim version of the Crusades. Not for the faint-hearted, Children of the End will hold the reader in its clutches right up to its terrifying, macabre climax.