Valis

Although known during his lifetime as a writer of science fiction, and more recently as the inspiration for such films as Blade Runner and Total Recall, Philip K. Dick properly belongs in the tradition of Vonnegut, Calvino, and Robertson Davies. His novels place touchingly ordinary men and women in intimate congress with the unknowable and the awe-full. Valis is the first book in Philip K. Dick's incomparable final trio of novels (the others are The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer). This disorienting and bleakly funny work is about a schizophrenic hero named Horselover Fat; the hidden mysteries of Gnostic Christianity; and reality as revealed through a pink laser. Valis is a theological detective story, in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime.