Alternative endings; scenes that shift from reality to dream sequence; characters with multiple personalities; unreliable narrators—this is the stuff of film noir thrillers. Add to that a Faustean tale about an Everyman named Bill Grimm who is taunted by an evangelist preacher named Carl Bob Deville, a kind of modern Mephistopheles who is after Bill’s wife, Betty, and what you have is A Sinner’s Progress, by David Sandlin.

I’ve been following A Sinner’s Progress for the last several years, and had a chance to catch up with David in his office at the Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers at the New York Public Library last week to find out how the final phase of his eight-volume visual narrative is coming along. He was awarded a Cullman Fellowship to study works in the library’s print collection with a view toward bringing his 15-year-long artist’s book project to a conclusion with a final volume in the form of a graphic novel. The volumes he has produced so far have been limited-edition artist’s books, for the most part executed as hand-pulled silkscreen prints.

David had copies of all eight books in the series on hand, as well as mock-ups of the grand finale, which presently exists as a three-volume group that will ultimately become one—the Trinity, I guess you could call it. Two of the three were hand-colored mockups, while the third has evolved to the stage of finished ink-jet prints. The way in which the three main characters—and their multiple iterations—come together is dizzying. Is Bill Grimm a hard-working Everyman trying to make sense of an American Dream gone south, or his he a scheming trickster as venal as Carl Bob? Will Betty see the light and find the true meaning of her life with Bill or will she hook up with Carl Bob? These are just two questions that must be asked, and there are hundreds more.

You can meet David Sandlin this Friday, June 3^rd at 6:30 pm at his presentation of A Sinner’s Progress at Central Booking and see the work in progress. Central Booking, 111 Front Street, Gallery 210, DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY. 347.731.6559.