I interpret VALIS as a personal journal for PKD during his bouts with psychosis masked as a theological science fiction book. He has true strides of genius throughout with clear manifestations of "craziness." But to us, what is craziness if only a subset of human behavior in which we do not or cannot understand (yet)? The pontificating on life and death by exploring Gnosticism and ancient religions was amusing, but there were far more interesting tidbits in his "meta" writing jumping between himself as the narrator and the protagonist, his alter ego, Horselover Fat. One may be quick to jump to the line, "I'm 12 years old and this is deep" but I truly believe there is much more going on here that eludes those browsing at the surface. It's highly entertaining and bends the mind throughout. He makes the reader giddy as much as he makes the reader introspective. While I really enjoyed Ubik this may have unseated it as my favorite PKD novel. It is the most masterful mixing of profundity and earnestness I've ever read.

Favorite Quotes:

"Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that—as if that weren’t enough—but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know."


"They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep him."


"There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive."


"The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom."


"Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away."


"It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours."


"To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies."


"Death hides within every religion. And at any time it can flash forth—not with healing in its wings but with poison, with that which wounds."