The Book of Skulls

The Book of Skulls is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg, first published in 1972. It was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1972, and both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1973.

Synopsis
The plot concerns four college students who discover a Catalan manuscript, The Book of Skulls, dealing with an order of monks living in a monastery in the Arizona desert, whose members claim the power to bestow immortality on those who complete their bizarre initiation rite. Most morbid among the order's mysteries is the ninth: for each group of four initiates, only two will become immortal; one will sacrifice himself; and one will be sacrificed by the others. The boys travel across America to the monastery, where they are accepted as a "Receptacle" and told that if one was to leave after swearing their life to the order, the three others would be forfeit.

The narrative switches back and forth between the viewpoints of the four students as each confronts his personal demons on the way to completing the ritual. Timothy, star athlete and prodigal son of a wealthy family, quickly grows disillusioned with austere monastic life. Ned, an openly gay poet, finds himself fascinated with the philosophical contrast between eternity and extinction. Eli, the gifted but awkward young man who discovered the manuscript, forces himself to divest the surety of the mundane for faith in the extraordinary. Oliver, the handsome over-motivated farm kid, works himself harder than ever out of a powerful lust for life. Their teachings include a history of immortality, alluding to prehistoric shamans and advanced Atlantean scholars.

One of the mentor monks puts them through a trial of confession: each student privately confessing their darkest moment to only one other. Ned confesses to Timothy about his gleeful role in a gay double affair, leading to a double suicide. Timothy confesses to Oliver about social belittlement and rejection leading to him drunkenly raping his sister. Oliver confesses to Eli about the day he was seduced into a homosexual fling as a teenager, and how he suppresses his desires. But on his turn Eli breaks confidentiality and tells Ned about Oliver's confession — a convenient "ad-hoc sin". Rejecting this, Ned forces Eli to give up his real guilt: his entire academic career is based on the brilliant but uncredited manuscript of a dead colleague.

Sent into a dissociative episode by the moment, Eli wanders the monastery throughout the night and begins to truly understand the spiritual components of the monks' teachings. As the sun rises, a disgusted Timothy attempts to convince Eli to leave one last time before walking back towards nearby Phoenix himself. Eli, knowing the consequences and feeling the time is at hand, bashes Timothy's head in with a carved stone skull. Shortly after, Oliver, who was approached in the night by an aggressive Ned, is found dead and castrated by many self-inflicted knife wounds, unable to handle the reality of his sexual orientation. With one initiate dead by murder and one by suicide, the monks declare the ninth mystery fulfilled and welcome the remaining two into eternal life.

Reception
Baird Searles found the novel well-crafted but unsatisfying, saying of the viewpoint characters that "none [were] particularly likeable, interesting, or convincing."

James Blish, despite finding the novel a "noble failure," described it as "so unobtrusively, flawlessly written that even at its most puzzling it comes as perilously close to poetic beauty as any of the contemporary novels I've ever read."

Film adaptation
The cover of the 2006 paperback edition stated that the novel is "Soon to be made into a major motion picture". While there has been speculation on various film-related websites, plans for production failed to materialize.

In 2003, Paramount Pictures optioned the film rights, with William Friedkin to direct and Jeff Davis adapting. No further development has been made.