The Father-thing

Rating:
Summary: Pick up the actual book instead.
Review: Philip K. Dick, The Father-Thing (Rosetta, 1954)

This is one of the oddest packages I have come across. Instead of being a Phil Dick short story collection, or even a single Phil Dick short story (either of which would be a reasonable assumption), this ebook contains Dick's short story mentioned in the title and a completely unrelated (well, it, too, was written in the 1950s) story by John Novotny called "The Bourbon Lake." Go figure.

The Father-Thing is not your typical Phil Dick story; there's very little detail to it. It's almost as if he had the idea and wanted to get it on paper as fast as he could, then never went back and revised it. (Still, someone could turn this into a wonderful movie, given enough artistic license.) The basic idea; a child's father is eaten by an alien (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers here), and the kid has to go recruit some help to get rid of the alien before it takes over the rest of his family. Now, think about all the wonderful ways you could have embellished that into two hundred pages. Dick sticks with all action and it lasts barely twenty. Most of what we can see here is unfulfilled potential.

"The Bourbon Lake" is nothing more than your typical pastoral shaggy-dog story. Two men (who like their drink) are dragged by their wives on a week's vacation to a town that has no tavern. Lo and behold, while walking in the woods, they discover a lake made of pure bourbon. There are some nifty touches (especially the cantankerous beaver), but there's really not much to the story. Still, the reading of it is a minor pleasure if you can get past the stereotypes (amazing how the two tipplers continuously maintain Irish accents, for example).

You're probably better off finding The Father-Thing in one of the larger collections of Dick's short fiction. ** ½