I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time.

This book could've only been written by someone who went through a serious drug addiction. The atmosphere of paranoia, murk, and fatigue is masterfully rendered and complemented by the hilarious dialogue satirising the hopeless state of our Californian heroes. It feels like the book offers an eerily realistic account of what it was like to be hooked on drugs in the American 60s-70s.

You progressively see how the charred embers of self cohere less and less until there's nothing left. The confusion of fractured identity seeping in to an increasingly unreliable reality, reflected infinitely by broken mirrors. The feeling of slow death. The loss of identity.

It seemed to Fred that he dialled each digit more and more slowly and it went on forever, and he shut his eyes, breathing to himself and thinking, Wow. I'm really out of it. You really are, he agreed. Spaced, wired, burned out and strung-out and fucked. Completely fucked. He felt like laughing.

The book made me think: Who am I really? Who am I the person online? Who am I the person to my friends? Who am I the person at my desk job? Who am I the person in the cockpit? To some extent, we all wear scramble suits and hide parts of ourselves from others and probably to ourself as well. We at least have some capacity to reconcile this but it's a lot harder when you're on Substance D.

I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.

Eerie, funny, sad, and schizo. PKD does it again.

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