Donald Webb is an American consul, stationed in the main port city of a Central American country. He has resigned himself, not unhappily, to a life of compromise and safety, until the day he receives a report from deep in the mountain jungle, a peculiarly incomplete report of the death of an obscure American painter whom he remembers from a brief and strange encounter.
The report and the memory combine to draw Webb into the jungle to find out the truth, leading him eventually to the base of a steep and forbidding mountain. There, in a mining camp, he learns that he must go yet further, and starts to climb to the peak. It is during this climb that Webb finds his life on a new, dangerous point of balance—an experience that leads him deep into himself far beyond the safeguards of civilization."
'The Thirteenth Apostle,' by Eugene Vale, is a philosophical novel which seeks answers to man's questions about his place in the universe. . . . Where did we come from? Where do we go? And in between why are we here? What must we do? What is the meaning and the purpose? Is there a God, and, if there is, how can He permit the wicked to flourish and the good and innocent to suffer? . . . We should have to go back to Thomas Mann’s 'The Magic Mountain,' I believe, to find a novel as rich in philosophic content as 'The Thirteenth Apostle.''--Saturday Review
"This is the stuff of which great novels are made . . . A powerful and significant book."--Los Angeles Times
"This provocative story dwells in a most engaging manner on the 'mystery of our role on earth—the great questions at the beginning and end of our existence.' . . . The quest leads the consul into deep soul-searching of his own. Readers find themselves confronted by the same eternal challenge “which can be pushed from our minds, but cannot be denied."--Reverend James Keller, McNaught Syndicate
"[Vale] achieves a supreme tour de force, a prolonged painting in words which evokes the same kind of response as a masterwork done in oils . . . Those who do not read The Thirteenth Apostle are depriving themselves of unique and enormous pleasure and profit."--Modern Age
"Mr. Vale is the only contemporary novelist of recent years, to my knowledge, who has made so ambitious an attempt to encompass in a single fabric every clue to modern man's devious retreat from engagement."--New York Times