The Book of Skulls is a very heavy period piece, a pressure cooker story of early 70s style New Wave SciFi paranoia. Four roommates at an elite East Coast college (it's Yale) are on a quest across America for a monastery that holds the secret of immortality, guided by an ancient tome found in the library stacks. But there's a catch. Mystery Nine states that life must be paid for by death: two members of the group will live forever, one will commit suicide, one will be murdered.

We meet our characters in rotating first person narration. Eli found the tome; he's a classicist, a neurotic New York Jewish intellectual. Ned is Irish Catholic, gay and/or bisexual, a self-styled Poet. Timothy is old establishment money, trust-funds and country clubs and a lineage back to the American Revolution. Oliver is a scholarship boy from Kansas, an intense youth who aims to become a doctor to defeat death.

They roadtrip across America, discussing their belief in their quest and its object, the various grades of friendships and animosities within the group, and sexual desire. There's an authenticity to very collegiate mix of shallowness and profundity. These boys have deep cracks, that have yet to be filled with the liquid of adulthood. Upon reaching the monastery, they are inducted into various mysteries and tested to see who will live, and who will die. Of the characters, Eli rings the trustest (his biography is close to Silverberg's), while Ned's frank homosexuality was bold and forthright for the period, but it hasn't held up very well (on the other hand, I wasn't there. Maybe a gay Boomer would find his portrayal more accurate). In the end, though, we know where these characters are headed, and their revelations, and the revelation of the true nature of immortality, are not as wrenching or interesting as I'd want. Silverberg, as always, turns a good yarn, but I've set to see him write a truly great one.