“The Dust of Eden” is a novel written on a great number of levels. For your average horror fan, there is the main story, winding its way from the desert outside Baghdad to the small assisted living community of New Eden, to the garden that first bore that name, and on to the conclusion. There are no slow moments in Sullivan’s prose. The plot is as winding and sinuous as the serpent that inhabits it, and the characters come to life along the way, each in his or her own time and depth, but the curves are more like whip-cracks, flicking the reader forward in roller-coaster fashion, than they are impediments.

Still, to be drawn into the quick moving plot and stop there would not do this work justice. There are deeper relationships binding certain of the characters. There are moral and philosophical questions littering the pages and demanding at least passing attention.

There is a crater full of red dust in the desert. A small, very secret circle of men guards it, to the death, as it has been since time out of mind. One man discovers that red bowl of sand by accident, and acts as men throughout history have acted. First he is curious, then he covets, and at last, when he has taken the object of his desire, he contemplates it, regrets his actions, and seeks redemption.

Though on the surface this is a novel of coincidences, beneath that is the thread of destiny. Do things happen because they happen, or is there a greater intelligence behind it? Is that intelligence malevolent, or benign? Loving, or manipulating? If that intelligence is, in fact, modeled after Man, as most organized religions would portray it, will it act in accordance with that similarity, or is there something greater and meaningful behind it all?

In “The Dust of Eden,” some of the sand of creation – whether it is the stuff of which Eden was made, or the dust that it became at its destruction, is not clear – is stolen. Most of what is stolen is reclaimed, presumably by the guardians from whom it was taken, but one vessel is mailed off America disguised as the ashes of a man who died while stealing it.

The ashes end up sitting around forgotten, until the night that Ariel, an artist, remembers them on the night she has chosen to end her life. When she mixes the sand of Creation with her paints, everything changes – for her, anyway, and what follows is, I believe a pretty accurate portrayal of Man (or Woman) as creator – how the human mind might react to ultimate power, how small the focus of their ambition could be, and how petty their handling of unthinkable control over others.

And Ariel has a daughter. Her daughter died in her forties, wheelchair bound after a rock climbing accident. Amber has returned, with the painting of her portrait, and from the daughter we get reflections of the mother, and the father, and another perspective of Creation.

Tied in with all of this, we have Martin and Denny Bryce. Martin is suffering the dementia of old age, forgetting almost daily what he has been told the day before, and the day before that. His son, Denny, loves him very much, but his own ability to provide a safe environment for his father is eroding with time, much like the older Bryce’s mind. When he discovers New Eden, and bullies his father into Ariel’s care, a new dynamic is introduced, and along with it a poignant portrait of the relationship between father and son, the dreams and memories that haunt the one, and the desperate efforts of the other to preserve the man who gave him life.

“The Dust of Eden” is not an easily classifiable work. The genres are, in and of themselves, not wide or forgiving enough to pigeonhole it, but the prose is powerful enough to span the borders.

Highly recommended.