Valis

Rating:
Summary: Amateur author
Review: For those of you who have discerning taste in literature, this book *is not* for you (. . . )Not only can he not stick to a consistent perspective, which results in the book shifting from first-person to third-person in an amateurish style, (. . . )
It's not postmodern, it's not gnostic, it’s not science fiction, IT'S NOT GOOD WRITING.

Rating:
Summary: Finger trap for the mind
Review: This one gets me every time. I don't read it for a while, then I read it again... and find myself thinking, "2 am, already? I've got to put this down."

Don't buy this one for good clean SF, but then you'd never come to Philip K. Dick for that, now would you? His other stories may leave you standing aside, looking on as horrible things happen to nearby protagonists. Here he really helps you identify with Fat, right as Fat goes drifting over his head into the deep end.

Rating:
Summary: The first book in K. Dick's masterpiece
Review: While in the desert one night, Philp K. Dick has a religous awakening (some would say a psycotic break, but who am to question his perception) in which he felt he had come to an understanding of the godhead. Valis is the semi-auto biographical story of this encounter and its ramifications.]

Heavy with a alegory and vivid images, K. Dick takes us on a strange, often seemingly drug induced journey through his understanding of what the world is, who we are, and what is our place in the cosmos. He ties together vast amounts of science, myth, and philosphy on this wonderous journey.

Is the book weird? Absolutely! Is it beautifully written and provacitive? Absolutely! Is it worthy your time to read? I suspect you can guess my answer.

Rating:
Summary: Dick was insane.
Review: I consider myself a Dick fan. I really enjoyed Electric Sheep, Martian Time-Slip, A Scanner Darkly, Man in the High Castle, Crap Artist, etc. Those books actually had plot and setting, and Dick was great at creating alternate worlds.

Not so much here. The vast majority takes place in Horselover Fat's (Philip Dick's) drug-addled mind. He ruminates endlessly on a bizarre theological system that throws together every major religion, sixties anti-establishment fervor, and whacked-out science fiction. He adds little but three-eyed aliens and mind-controlling satellites... cool ideas, but not enough to hold up an entire book. (I first read about the mind-controlling satellite in Radio Free Albemuth anyways, and that book actually has plot and setting). Then again, Phil has always borrowed heavily. The Mercer cult in Electric Sheep was taken straight from Camus' Myth of Sisyphus.

This book is most interesting as a slide into madness, especially in light of the fact that Dick actually seemed to believe that Valis was beaming information at him (see The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of by Thomas Disch). Dick was coming off meth addiction, and hallucinations are common, but he refused to see these images as internally created. All I got from this book was a drug-addled, isolated mind attempting to make sense of its own madness. Anyone who's had a bad trip on acid has been here before. I would recommend Crap Artist more, as there the idiot savant is actually trying to cope with the external world, whereas in Valis we get primarily the abstract madness in isolation. The only character who made sense to me was Kevin, and even he bought into the Valis cult at the end.

The fact that Dick actually believed this stuff was a little scary; it made me feel like I was reading L. Ron's Dianetics. If you are interesting in seeing just how weird Dick can get, or find religious rumination to be interesting, you'll probably get a lot more out of this book.

Rating:
Summary: An Oddly Disorienting Masterpiece
Review: This is perhaps the densest, hardest to penetrate book I've ever read. And I've read a lot. Essentially autobiographical, sprinkled with fictional elements to create a small semblance of "plot", Valis is Philip K. Dick trying, through writing, to find out what the hell happened to him in the 70's. It can be nearly impossible to follow at times. And reading the Tracate sprinkled throughout the book (and in an appendix at the end of the novel) one truly has to wonder if the man was insane. But if you dig below the surface, and see what Dick's really getting at here, you will find that the book is worth the trouble it takes to read it. No doubt you'll never understand all of it. That's not the point. I would not recommend this book for everyone, it's dense and hard at times to follow and not at all written in a conventional style (not that much PDK is.) However, if you are tired of mainstream literature and long for something more, or perhaps answers to the BIG questions, then this book is for you. Also, an absolute must-read for Dick fans, personal and wonderful as it is. If Valis turns you off at first, don't worry, stick with it, it's worth the rollercoaster ride it takes you on.

Rating:
Summary: Let's get to the heart of things
Review: In 'Valis' Philip Dick takes us on another journey into the very soul of being. He explores ideas that many of us shove into the back of our mind as too complex or too distressing to spend any time with - they might clutter our lives too much. But they are there always, nagging away in the background - how do you decide what is real? was that smile from a pretty girl really an encouragement to me, or am I fooling myself? how can I tell? does my wife really love me? do my children? is there a God? and how can I manage the terror of death - my own and the death of those I love?

This novel is more than an exploration of the ideas that Philip Dick worried about that we all do (Dick is forever quoting other worriers - Mahler, Dowland, the I Ching etc etc) - it is a very personal almost autobiographical sharing. I read the novel, and read it again. I don't believe I will understand all of it ever. Perhaps some of it is not understandable in any meaningful way (Clifford Simak wrote a wonderful short story about things that may not be understood, called 'Limiting Factor') but it is such a wonderful trigger for my own racing mind as it explored its own journey amongst ideas.

...

Rating:
Summary: Stick with it
Review: When I read the back cover of this book at my local bookstore, I was intrigued. "VALIS is a theological detective story, in which God is both missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime." Whoa. That sounds awesome. And, having read the book, I must say: it IS awesome. VALIS is one of the finest books I've read.

Now, I admit, it is a refined taste. It is a book that you ever love more than anything or totally despise (Catch-22, anyone? I love it, but I know people who... don't. LOL). I can't say that I truely understood what, well, the first 85 pages or so are COMPLETELY about, but if you stick with it and read it through, I believe you'll find, as I did, that it all begins to gradually fall into place. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the last two chapters or so had a sizable impact on the way I look at myself, God, and the universe.

I would recommend this book to anyone who dares to question himself and his surroundings. It challenged the way I think and I believe myself to be a better person because of it.

Rating:
Summary: Read it more than once
Review: VALIS feels relatively uncomfortable, yet remains hard to walk away from. You arrive planning to settle down into a book about science fiction and soon the psychological quicksand has risen to your shoulders. (Perhaps the mind is the final frontier.)

It gets deeper when you come back to it again. This book leaves you poring over the typos, looking for hidden meanings, sure that you have found a few. If you could take it like a pill, we would pass laws to make it illegal.

Rating:
Summary: Painfully Brilliant
Review: Valis is an all out mind jacking. The theology is a splinter that will detonate like a grenade in your brain and leave nasty scars. I have also read the other parts of the Valis trilogy, and I believe this is the best. Beware though, this is the type of book that can and will hurt your conceptions of the world around you.

Rating:
Summary: Diary of a beautiful madman.
Review: As a few other reviewers have noted, Dick is an extremely inconsistent author. He never wants for interesting ideas but the execution can be hit or miss. VALIS is a direct hit. This is by far my favorite PKD novel and it is one of my favorite books by any author. Dick delves heavily here into pre-Socratic philosophy and ancient Christianity. Somehow through PKD's madness the potentially dull subject matter is fascinating and compelling.