What the fuck did i just read

"Some reviewers found it a profound novel. I only find it frightening. I was unable to proofread the galleys because the novel frightened me so." -PKD

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The Man in the High Castle is actually the only book by him I didn't like.

I recognize that it has issue. What struck you about it?

Valis is really interesting, probably one of his strangest just because parts of it might actually be true.

I found it scarier than Ubik, honestly. Both have a similar existential horror.

what am i missing here? i read ubik as a scifi whodoneit. whats terrifying about it?

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desu non of his other works come close to valis. I read them all, some were OK, but none gripped me like the valis books.

Christfags shill this incomplete nonsense so hard, it's embarrassing. Flow My Tears is better than the Valis trilogy. Three Stigmata and Ubik, too.

The idea of living your life knowing that you are a preserved corpse, or worse, not knowing whether you are dead of alive.

The part where everything reverts to a more primitive platonic counterpart until it all breaks down and that coldness seeps into your own being until you becoming nothing but ash was spoopy as fuck

t. satanist

Flow My Tears is embarrassingly bad, especially compared to his other work

No it isn't. It's one of his best.

>might actually be true
>might
Read the exegesis.

>80% of threads on Veeky Forums

Do people actually enjoy reading Philip K Dick!? I got a few pages into Androids and cringed so hard I actually made the book close over. I took that to be a sign.

>Do people actually enjoy reading Philip K Dick!?
Frankly, I find a lot of his style to be corny and his technical skill at wordsmithing to be a little thin. That having been said, he raises interesting issues. Much of what you think is excellent, original work elsewhere found its genesis in PKD's work. I do not consider him a master write but he was an excellent thinker. Unfortunately he had no one to craft his ideas onto paper for him so we work with what we have - and I find it worthwhile.

*writer

He wasn't an excellent thinker either, it's just acid casualty space cadet solipsism.

Just finished High Castle, the end was l... interesting. I wasnt disappointing but i was thrown off because his endings always feel like the beginning of an action movie. This happened with a Scanner Darkly as well.

Also what the FUCK was going on in that paragraph when Mrs. Frink figures out something is wrong when they get to the hotel.

Dunning-Kruger case, the fact that you didn't even finish reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is proof.

>Also what the FUCK was going on in that paragraph
Can you point to it? That's towards the end when she has the fancy dress and forgets to bring the fancy bra to go with it, right?

This. In fact, I think PKD’s plain and not very poetic style works perfectly for his novels. If there were anymore poetics, it’d detract from the ideas and situations and characters. Other authors are the type to spend useless (even if well-written) sentences and paragraphs describing scenery and certain objects and so on. PKD just hits you with everything fluidly and smoothly. He’s not even deliberately minimalist in a grating, faux way which draws attention to its own conscious and deliberate aestheticism and minimalism, like Beckett, or sometimes Hemingway. I like Beckett and Hemingway but you sometimes get the feeling reading their works, “This is deliberately very minimalistic,” giving you a sense of artifice or strain. PKD’s is just a smooth style, neither too flowery nor too minimalistic.

Also, he sometimes can hit a surprisingly good stride, as in the passage of the dream of Felix Buckman by the end of Flow my Tears.

Interesting. I may give it another go.

>neither too flowery nor too minimalistic.
I agree that it is genuine. I just find it to be thin in spots and I speculate that he could have added more without slowing the pace. I would have appreciated Androids written as a full length magnum opus. I am left speculating what it could have been.

>Interesting.
Which part hit home?

Sorry, dont have the book with me but yes that's the part. Its incredibly visceral and clunky, probably because he's trying to write a woman being highly irrational... it happens for almost that entire page if I remember correct. Of all his books I've read that part sticks out to me the most.

Ironically, PKD didn’t even try acid until after he had written some of his most well known novels (including the book in the OP, Three Stigmata, which was assumed by everyone to be about acid). In fact, he later confessed that he didn’t even like acid and had only done it twice and instead of having a profound mystical experience, just had bad trips. He also told people in his own life not to do acid. The drugs he was mainly addicted to were amphetamines, he also smoked pot and drank regularly, and went through a period where he just popped a bunch of any random pills he could get his hands on, including:

>antipsychotics, antidepressants, sedatives, hypnotics, muscle relaxants, and stimulants

Which, ironically, are not the typical hallucinogenic/psychedelic drugs you’d think PKD would have been doing and which his novels are supposedly reminiscent of. He also later in his life did mescaline, which he claimed to love as a psychedelic, but, again, after writing most of his well-known novels which people view as “trippy”, but before Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said, which he claimed was at least partially based on an overwhelming experience of extreme feelings of love and empathy he experienced on it. Anyway, that aside, he, later in his life, confessed to deliberately playing up the idea of himself as a frequent acid user and Three Stigmata and his books being about acid for publicity when, again, he hadn’t used it much and hadn’t liked it. Almost any critical biography or literary critic would agree Dick was more fascinated and inspired by the mythos and aura of the bizarre surrounding psychedelic drugs themselves than he was actually influenced in his novels by psychedelic or drug experiences.

>Which, ironically, are not the typical hallucinogenic/psychedelic drugs you’d think PKD would have been doing
Short term use of methedrine does not entail massive personality alteration. Long-term, heavy usage entails loss of proper sleeping cadence which can, in itself, cause a personality shift.

This. The acid myth was created by journalists.
He took a lot of pills but most of them were given to him by his multiple shrinks