Kim Miller
Four college students drive into the desert to see who stays alive.
An ancient manuscript in a dead language sits deep inside the storage stacks of a university library. A student finds it, translates it in a rudimentary way, and is fascinated enough by the promise of eternal life in the text that he talks his roommates into driving across the country to find the mystical community that it references. Take no notice that the document is 1500 years old, the student is convinced that the community is still out there. Also, dismiss the thought of danger when the document prophesies that four people will go, one will be killed by another, one will take his own life, and two will go on to never die.
The story is told by each of the four young men, swapping between them chapter by chapter. There is their response to the invitation, the decision to take the Easter break and go west, the drive across the country, finding the monastery, and what happens once they are there.
The prose is tight and engaging, the move between narrators is not jarring even though the men are very different from each other. And the events in the monastery are somehow banal - eg. the daily life of the monks as they care for the garden - and unsettling at the same time. The end of the book approaches and nothing seems to be happening in relation to the prophecy, until it does. And once certain events are set in train we are struck again by the banality of the prophecy's fulfillment.
Four college students drive into the desert to see who stays alive.
An ancient manuscript in a dead language sits deep inside the storage stacks of a university library. A student finds it, translates it in a rudimentary way, and is fascinated enough by the promise of eternal life in the text that he talks his roommates into driving across the country to find the mystical community that it references. Take no notice that the document is 1500 years old, the student is convinced that the community is still out there. Also, dismiss the thought of danger when the document prophesies that four people will go, one will be killed by another, one will take his own life, and two will go on to never die.
The story is told by each of the four young men, swapping between them chapter by chapter. There is their response to the invitation, the decision to take the Easter break and go west, the drive across the country, finding the monastery, and what happens once they are there.
The prose is tight and engaging, the move between narrators is not jarring even though the men are very different from each other. And the events in the monastery are somehow banal - eg. the daily life of the monks as they care for the garden - and unsettling at the same time. The end of the book approaches and nothing seems to be happening in relation to the prophecy, until it does. And once certain events are set in train we are struck again by the banality of the prophecy's fulfillment.