both warm and frightening, this text walks a tightrope. the nature and extent of pkd's psychoses are hard to fathom from his novels alone. layers of distancing and framing abound. i can only imagine what his exegesis contains, and have no way to gauge the man himself. but a blurry image is beginning to form from an increasingly wider reading of his fiction.

[0] in pkd's characters, i find both comfort and danger. focussing on the friends of the main characters in VALIS, you find the redeeming feature of the world portrayed. in fact it was their existence, however flawed, that allowed me to persist in reading.