The Book of Skulls
★★★★★
Four students seek out an ancient immortality cult, but the price of eternal life is that two must die. The story is told from the first-person perspective of each of the four - chapter by chapter we rotate around the group, gradually fleshing out their initial stereotypes with rich, twisted backstories. Despite the hook, this is 100% a character-centric story, with little exploration of the SF/fantasy premise.
The first half of the book is pure road trip, laying out the social dynamics through encounters, inner monologues, and frankly straight-out lecturing each other, but it works. Silverberg’s narrative is pure 70s trippy new wave - drugs, sex, homosexuality, epic run-on sentences lasting a whole page, streams of consciousness, and much philosophising.
Like all road trips, this is a journey of discovery. Each has demons to surface and all are unstable - at the transition point to adulthood and scared of knowing themselves. The reader is similarly thrown off balance as opinion on who should die is switched and switched again as we learn more about our protagonists and come to realise none of them are in any sense worthy.
In the second half of the book, the cult in the desert puts our boys through rigorous trials leading up to thrilling backstory reveals and the final act - is the promise of immortality real? Are the deaths a metaphor? If not, who should die?
The climax is gripping, while questions are left ambiguously hanging. This is a story about knowing yourself, about inner demons, about sexuality, about the power of cults, about a road trip. It packs it all in and leaves it all hanging out for the reader to draw their own lines in the sand, conclude what’s real, and stand in judgment of our protagonists.
