It’s the product of a tortured mind wrestling with itself, while at the same time trying to make art. VALIS is a brilliant book, one that nobody else could have written.

He also wrote some of the most original and creative fiction of the twentieth century, which has been adapted into films such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report, and he’s one of my all-time favourite writers. He was a heavy drug user, and at one point attempted suicide. He suffered through poverty, a number of failed marriages, a lack of mainstream success, and childhood trauma (he had a twin sister who died six weeks after they were born). He even goes to the extent of inserting himself as a character, at one point criticising Horselover Fat, aka himself, for indulging in self-absorbed fantasies to distract himself from reality. It’s clear that Dick wrote this in an extreme mental state, but there is a level of technical control that wouldn’t be possible without a significant degree of self-awareness. This isn’t to say that the book is simply deranged rambling. Seeing the way he builds up a rationalisation of his experiences, combining thinkers from history with his own exegesis, is a revealing look into the workings of a broken mind. A major theme throughout Dick’s work is the illusory nature of reality, and VALIS is in a way the ultimate culmination of this, backed up by ‘proof’ in the form of the pink light. The novel contains a lot of philosophical and religious discussion, which might be off-putting to some, but I thought it was fascinating. When he is released, he teams up with some friends to try to get to the bottom of what’s going on. After the incident with the pink beam, he is committed to a mental institution, where he begins an ‘exegesis’, documenting his outlandish theories about what happened. The main character is named Horselover Fat, an alter ego for Dick himself (although he appears later as a character, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction). The plot is largely aligned with Dick’s experience as described above, but diverges from reality as the book goes on.

VALIS by Philip K. Dick