Cops and criminals have always been interdependent, but no novel has explored that perverse symbiosis more powerfully than A Scanner Darkly. Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug called Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, he has taken on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D--which Arctor takes in manmoth does--gradually splits the user's brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn't realize that he is narcing on himself.
Caustically funny, eerily accurate in its depiction of junkies, scam artists, and the walking brain-dead, Philip K. Dick's industrial-grade stress test of identity (both his character's and the reader's) may be the most unnerving drug novel ever written.
" Dick was...one of the genuine visionaries that North American fiction has produced in this century, and his best novels constitute as significant a body of work as that of any writer in this conuntry in the last thirty years." ---LA Weekly---
"Dick [was] many authors: a poor man's Pynchon, and oracular postmodern, a rich product of the changing counterculture." ---The Village Voice--