OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12)

By: Gordon Dahlquist
May 13, 2026

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Seventies (1974–83) sci-fi novels and comics! Series edited by Josh Glenn.

VALIS | PHILIP K. DICK | 1981

“A broken book by a damaged man” is certainly one way to characterize Philip K. Dick’s novel VALIS, yet “a book of self-lacerating heroism” would be equally accurate. Dick’s attempt to make fictional sense of both the life-changing events of 2-3/74 (when PKD experienced a wave of hallucinations and visions, including a beam of pink light, that, among other things, imparted the — true — information that Dick’s son had a life-threatening birth defect) and the ouroboric 8,000-page Exegesis that followed is aggressively metafictional, relentlessly erudite, and heartbreaking.

A circle of friends fumble their way through 1970s Southern California as if under an occupying regime, their days marked by suicide, drug use, divorce, cancer, cynicism, loneliness, and despair. Then scraps of insight and wisdom arrive one night in a beam of pink light to transform — and warp — the understanding of partial-protagonist Horselover Fat. This extra-terrestrial event and Fat’s desperate attempts to decode its meaning (and origin) set in motion a philosophical investigation that eventually strips illusion from the known world. Folding time and space, the failure of the ’60s counterculture maps onto the failure of human enlightenment across history, a Roman Empire that never fell, Richard Nixon another (or the same) oppressive Caesar. Fat’s theories recapitulate and synthesize the esoteric ages: Gnosticism, Pre-Socratics, Plato, Zoroastrianism, Rosicrucianism, Buddhism, Jung and Freud, and so much more — a Hail-Mary-audacious churn to explain the nature of human experience. Unless, of course, Fat is merely — or is it also? — insane.

At least a third of the book is circular philosophical speculation, entwined through the daily struggles of the narrator, Philip K. Dick, and Horselover Fat. These struggles are real and vivid, especially Fat’s attempted suicide and subsequent stay in a mental hospital. The plot proper kicks in about half-way through, with the discovery of a film, VALIS, that seems to mirror — and confirm — every esoteric theory Fat has formed. Dick, Fat, and two friends travel to meet the filmmakers in Sonoma where they meet — more or less — the 5th incarnation of the Savior, the product of a human woman and a sentient satellite from a distant star, a two-year old girl who speaks to them in both complete sentences and through images and dreams, telepathically. At this point the plot is upended again and the possibility of salvation re-banished — or is it only re-postponed? — relative to belief, relative to heartbreak, relative to despair.

What can you live with? Can you continue on?

What’s astonishing about VALIS is Dick’s decision to lay himself completely open, practically an autopsy subject, in a confessional whose tender self-exposure approaches — again, explicitly, relentlessly — the edge of self-destruction. Yet this strategy unfolds through his absolute writerly control. He’s an old pro writing for his life and the simple story is in fact masterful. The psychosis of the book is the psychosis of the time, and its lapses perhaps only mercy. The stakes of human decency are literally eternal, and our sacrifice, like the Empire, may never end.

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OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12)

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