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Philip K. Dickathon: The Cosmic Puppets
Guest Blogger and WWEnd Member, Charles Dee Mitchell, has contributed a great many book reviews to WWEnd and we’ve invited him to contribute to our blog. This is the latest in Dee’s series of Philip K. Dick reviews that he started on his blog www.potatoweather.blogspot.com. We’ll be posting one every week until he runs out of reviews or gets tired of Philip K. Dick books.
If written today, The Cosmic Puppets could have been Philip K. Dick‘s foray into YA fantasy fiction. He would have needed to change the protagonist into a plucky teenager instead of a full-grown man, but other than that all the elements are in place.
On a road trip to Florida with his almost estranged wife, Ted Barton wants to stop off at Millgate, the Virginian town he left as a young man eighteen years before. They find the town, but everything about it has changed. (Cue the Twilight Zone theme music here.) Street names, buildings, people, everything is different and slightly decrepit. Then Ted finds his name in an old newspaper, a victim of scarlet fever in 1935.
The Cosmic Puppets is pure fantasy — no science fiction involved. There are two children, Peter who makes tiny clay golems to report of Ted’s movements, and Mary who gets regular reports from moths and bees on Peter’s activities. Mary and Peter do not get along. Peter reveals to Ted the enormous beings who make up the valley’s mountainsides and whose heads reach into the heavens. Little Millgate, Virginia, has become the host of an epic battle between the forces of good and evil. (Just their bum luck.) Ted and the town drunk who somehow escaped "the change" have to will the real Millgate back into existence.
There are some creepy elements here, mostly dependent upon how you feel about spiders and rats. But the Twilight Zone theme continues to hum along in the background, and Rod Serling could make an appearance at any moment.
3 Comments
I read this one a few months back as it was the selection for our book club. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it and how it was not at all what I expected from other PKD books that I had read. You are correct in that this could very well be a YA book with just a tweak of the protagonist’s age. It reminded me in some ways of a Heinlein juvenile, only with more of a fantasy focus as opposed to science fiction. And yes, I too heard Twilight Zone music in the background. I think I commented in the group discussion that I am surprised someone didn’t make it into a TZ episode. All in all I found it an enjoyable read.
Glad you enjoyed the book and the review. Having read a PKD biography, I really wondered "where this one came from." Since I’ve been reading the novels chronologically I’ve come to accept abrupt changes in tone and the occasional piece of hackwork, but there is really nothing like this one.
It didn’t even sound to me like a PKD story when I read the description. I’m glad the book club picked it as I had never seen the book in any bookstore, new or used, and it is hard telling if I would have picked the book up otherwise.
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