The Book of Skulls
Four college roommates on the East Coast embark on a road trip to Arizona in search of immortality in THE BOOK OF SKULLS, Robert Silverberg’s 1972 novel now back in print thanks to a new Del Rey trade – something it deserved just for the cool cover alone.
From a text in their university library, the quartet of students in question – a Jew, a rich kid, a farm boy, a homosexual – learns of an ancient monestary in the middle of the desert known as the Brotherhood of the Skulls. Eternal life on this earth is promised by the Brotherhood, but at a price: One must commit suicide and one must be murdered in order for the other two to attain it. Strangely (but thankfully for you, the reader), all four seem to buy into the idea, so they make their way west, philosophizing, bickering and screwing each other (metaphorically) along the way.
SKULLS is told from each of the kids’ viewpoints, though consecutively instead of in RASHOMON fashion. Initially, I was afraid this approach would be confusing, but their personalities really stand out, if not their voices. My main problem lies with the long paragraphs that sometimes stretch out over three pages or when the narrative lapses into travelogue mode. Given that it’s more than 30 years old, the book shows its age (witness the gratuitous use of the word “groovy” or the name-checking of Peter Fonda), but its themes are timeless, with Silverberg playing the angst cards just as much as the spiritual, the horrific and, yes, the sexual (sometimes explicitly so).
This marks my introduction to Silverberg in the long form, and he’s as good here as I’ve found him to be in a fraction of the page count. His work is tight, intriguing and mostly unpredictable. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve ever read before and refuses to be pegged into one genre; for instance, the horror comes not out of a supernatural event, but the way the young men treat one another. It doesn’t matter where it belongs when it’s very good. Silverberg’s new afterword puts it in a proper historical perspective, not that you’ll need it to recognize the quality. –Rod Lott
[...] Any anthology worth its salt needs to contain old favorites and new surprises. This book succeeds, but only just, and I wonder if the truly committed fantasy reader who is already overly familiar with names like Gordon R. Dickson, Katherine Kurtz, Robert Silverberg and Orson Scott Card will want a book that features much of their work already published in different form. [...]