Silverberg produced several novels dealing with the feelings and aspirations of counterculture youth of the late 1960s and early 1970s, most notably in the unsuccessful attempt at a romantic visionary statement, Son of Man (1971), and in A Time of Changes (1971), which romanticized the possibilities of a drug culture.

Neither of these has the satirical impact of The Book of Skulls, but his novella, The Feast of Dionysus (1973) treats from a tragic perspective the search for reality in a religious cult in the southwest desert.

Indirectly, other Silverberg novels of this period comment on some of the themes of The Book of Skulls. His celebrated novel, Dying Inside (1972) describes the reality of the contemporary world from which Silverberg's students are fleeing. The horror of recognizing the isolation of the self—the fate of the surviving protagonists in The Book of Skulls—is depicted in The...