The H Word: The Waking Nightmares of Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick is not a household name but much of his science fiction is: Hollywood adaptations of his work include Blade Runner, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. He never wrote a vampire or werewolf story, and he almost never played with the common tropes of the horror genre, but I am not alone in the opinion that he wrote some of the most terrifying pieces of fiction in the twentieth century. And while Dick never published a novel marketed as horror, his masterpiece The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch was featured in 100 Great Horror Books (edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman).

It started with the death of his twin sister as an infant, the divorce of his parents at five years old, intense amphetamine use, and a series of paranoid events that always gave his fiction an edge of horror. To Philip K. Dick the one haunted place a person couldn’t escape was their mind. In this article, I intend to highlight how often Philip K. Dick used nightmares, paranoia, and cosmic horror to meld the macabre throughout his philosophically explorative fiction.

Early in PKD’s career when he was focused mostly on short stories, he had pieces that could be considered straight horror like “The Cookie Lady” and “The Father-Thing,” and others that were considered science fiction like “Second Variety” and “Pay the Printer” were as horrific as anything HP Lovecraft wrote in the pages of Weird Tales.

The waking nightmares that lived in the back of PKD’s mind drove his most terror-inducing tales. Dick was not just afraid that his neighbor was an alien or a robot—his stories explored the question of “What if I AM AN ALIEN OR A ROBOT?” When the stories open, his characters trust reality just like you or me, but often discover that everything from their body to the cosmos is manufactured. Two decades after the release of The Matrix it might not seem like a revolutionary idea, but consider that in 1977 an agoraphobic PKD somehow made it to speak at a conference in Metz, France, and stunned the audience by insisting that “we are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed and some alteration in our reality occurs. We would have the overwhelming impression that we are reliving the present—déjà vu—perhaps in precisely the same way: hearing the same words . . . I submit that these impressions are valid and significant.”

From giant cyborg godheads he claimed were watching him, to ancient computer simulations, and an artificial intelligence explaining God to him in a beam of pink light, PKD made many wild claims that he insisted were true. They are detailed in the excellent book The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick by Kyle Arnold. While the stated goal of Arnold’s book is a look at the mystery of the heart and mind of PKD, he does this often by looking at Dick’s stories—many of them horror.

Some of these stories are just fun horror tales, like “The Cookie Lady,” which is the story of a woman who lures children to their deaths with cookies. Other horror tales explore themes central to PKD’s fears about the universe. A basic paranoia is often at the center of simple horror fiction stories that PKD wrote in the early ’50s. “Expendable” is a very short story about insects being aliens at war with human beings, a very paranoid thought experiment inspired by a buzzing, annoying insect. “The Father-Thing” is about a boy who discovers his parents have been replaced by malevolent aliens. A simple body snatcher story is inspired by Phil’s father disappearing when Dick was only five years old. A later story from 1969, “Electric Ant” is a horrific tale of a man who discovers his life as flesh and blood person was entirely an illusion. Many of Dick’s short stories have science fictional settings, with examples like “The Crawlers” (about postwar mutant children), “The Crystal Crypt” (about a weapon that can shrink cities to the size of paperweights), and 1966’s “Faith of the Fathers,” which is probably his most advanced short horror story, blending themes of alternate realities, mass hallucinations, and a cult-like leader into a fantastic horror tale.

Nightmares of Empathy

When Philip K. Dick sat at his typewriter, he wanted to tell stories and pay the bills, but at his heart he was a philosophical thinker. One reason why he became such an important voice of the twentieth century was because he was tapping into themes much deeper than even he realized at the time. A philosophical edge of many of his novels and stories is in the power of empathy.

In PKD’s most famous novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (adapted into the film Blade Runner), the artificial slave class used to build off-world colonies, Andys, are forbidden from living on a resource-starved Earth choking on the dust from the blasts of World War Terminus. Many of the philosophical ideas in the novel were lost in the Hollywood translation, including the storyline about reverence for the last remaining animals. This reverence has gotten to the point that protecting animals has become a status symbol. Empathy for animals is something Andys are not capable of, and the lack of empathy is the best way to detect who is human. This leads to a painful realization for the Andys, as seen through this comment by Garland (the Andy who poses as a cop): “ . . . Breaking free and coming here to earth, where we’re not even considered animals. Where every worm and woodlouse is considered more desirable than all of us put together.”

This novel is often funny, and strange but the dark implications are there for the reader looking deeper into the text. One of the true horrors of the novel is that technology has made a class of persons devoid of empathy. Deckard opens the novel caring for an electric sheep, desperate to show his neighbors that he has enough empathy to care about others. And yet, Deckard, who is so desperate to have the money to care for a real animal, will hunt and destroy Andys. He’s part of a cycle that has already come close to destroying the sustainability of the planet. The question the novel asks us to ponder is: Do we have the empathy to stop the destruction of our world?

That use of empathy is a reversal from “Second Variety,” a story written in 1952 that is a masterpiece and one of the best things PKD ever wrote. It takes place after the Soviets and Americans nearly destroyed the Earth in a nuclear war. The Americans won in part because they unleashed tiny artificially intelligent killing machines called Claws that eventually evolved on their own to mimic humans. To infiltrate the last human bunkers, the Claws design a robot called a “David” that looks like a starving child. What makes this story horror is that artificial intelligence uses human empathy as a trap. Empathy is the essence of humanity to PKD, and he often wrote about threats exploiting it. One of Phil’s greatest fears was empathy weaponized.

Another example of this is the 1953 short horror story “The Hanging Stranger.” Ed Loyce is an everyday salesman who is shocked when no one seems to notice that a man is hanging dead from a light post. When Loyce reports the body, he discovers that the body is a trap to identify people who have not fallen under the spell of aliens in the process of an invasion. It is his empathy that dooms him.

Tomb World and the Cosmic Horror of Philip K. Dick

The sheer scale of the cosmos is almost impossible for our human minds to entirely make sense of. HP Lovecraft—one of the subgenre’s most notable figures—approached the cosmic from a baseline of characters who were often already driven mad by the by brief views of the cosmic scale. Philip K. Dick, on the other hand, investigated our connection to reality, but was very inspired by the study of European psychoanalysts. This started when his third wife checked out a book from the library in the early ’60s: “The Case of Ellen West” by Ludwig Binswanger. In 1921 at the age of thirty-three, West poisoned herself, claiming that she felt she was in a death-obsessed existence she could only escape by dying. Her psychiatrist Binswanger referred to this as her “Tomb World,” a concept that PKD wrote about in his novels Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Martian Time-Slip.

For Phil, who spent his life haunted by the memory of his dead sister, the idea of a tomb world that each person struggles not to fall into was a powerful one. One of the most horrific moments in all of PKD’s career involves the alienation of the tomb world addressed in Martian Time-Slip. Inspired by the autistic son of Phil’s record store co-worker Vincent Lusby, the character in Martian Time Slip is shifted out of time. As Kyle Arnold put it in his book The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick: “Steiner’s perception of death and dying renders it almost impossible for him to communicate with other human beings, because Steiner perceives them as horrific walking corpses who emit only “gubbish.”

This leads to one of the most unsettling quotes from Martian Time-Slip when Steiner looks at Arnie Knott:

“Inside Mr. Knott’s skin were dead bones, shiny and wet. Mr. Knott was a sack of bones, dirty and yet shiny wet. His head was a skull that took in greens and bit them; inside him the greens became rotten things as something ate them to make them dead.

Jack Bolan, too, was a dead sack, teeming with ‘gubbish.’”

Steiner sees the body as the outside that was painted “pretty.” Martian Time-Slip is not a horror novel, but Steiner’s alienation from time, and the haunting future only he can see provides one of the creepiest concepts I have ever read.

One of the best studies of Philip K. Dick’s connection to cosmic horror was in the book After Engulfment: Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Frank Herbert by Ellen J. Greenham. The Australian researcher understands that the breakdown of illusion is the key to how PKD thrusts his character into horror, saying, “It might be said that the single biggest mistake that the human creature appears to make in the universe is when it mistakes the map for the territory. In Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K. Dick not only draws out this idea but then reveals the motivation behind why the human creature makes such an error.”

PKD always starts his novels with characters who choose these illusions. One of my favorite examples is in the novel Galactic Pot-Healer, featuring the Jiffy-view, a 3-D projection of Carmel, California, that Joe Fernwright has animated outside his Cleveland apartment window. But examples of characters choosing illusions in PKD novels are endless. His first novel about simulated realities was the 1957 novel The Eye in the Sky, a novel very much about personal perception of reality. There is a certain horror to Seth in the novel A Maze of Death, who chooses to become a cactus to escape illusion, or Rick Deckard accepting the mechanical frog after reality itself became too much for him to ponder in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

But perhaps the most frightening avatar of cosmic horror in PKD’s fiction is the unrelenting dust created by World War Termius in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: “No one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust that contaminated most of the planet’s surface had originated in no country, no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it.”

Another true concept of horror within Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the idea that the dust always wins. “He wondered if Mozart had any intuition that the future didn’t exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have, too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal move along. This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die. Eventually, the last score of music will be destroyed in one way or another; Finally the name “Mozart” will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet, then another. We can evade it awhile. As the Andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But I get them or some other bounty hunter gets them. In a way he realized, I’m part of the form-destroying process of empathy.”

The dust always wins.

His Horror Masterpiece

In the Spring of 1963, Philip K. Dick was living in Point Reyes in Marin County. When he was writing, he got so grumpy and irritable that his third wife Anne insisted that he find somewhere to write besides their house. Down the road, he rented a shed he referred to as his hovel. It served as the inspiration for the terrible living conditions on Mars in his novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

As he worked on an earlier novel he had an experience that shaped his horror masterpiece. “The Palmer Eldritch novel came out of an actual mystical experience, lasting almost a month, in which I saw the face of evil hovering over the landscape, and the three stigmata were aspects of him that I saw—I mean, objectively, literally—in particular the slotted, empty eyes. It was a true trip before I had seen any LSD, much less taken any. In an effort to help myself I became a convert to the Anglo-Catholic church, but their teachings do not include that of a real, active, evil power who has control—or near control—of the earth we live on.”

Was this his overactive imagination or a side effect of amphetamine-induced psychosis? The result was a novel featured in Stephen Jones & Kim Newman’s critical anthology Horror: 100 Best Books. The essay by best-selling science fiction writer Tad Williams does a wonderful job of highlighting the power of it: “Dick had a firm hold of something that seems to exceed the grasp of many writers who have made a career out of horror fiction, namely there is nothing so frightening as the naked vulnerability of the human mind.”

The novel takes place in a future where the Earth has become so hot that many have started to join the efforts to colonize Mars. So harsh and unlivable has life has become that our point-of-view character Barney Mayerson and his boss Leo Bulero sell a drug called Can-D that transports users into a Barbie life simulation called Perky Pat. They are making great money until industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from interstellar space and offers salvation in the form of a drug called Chew-Z. Once users take the drug, reality becomes the domain of Palmer Eldritch.

This is a deeply weird novel that is hard for most readers to follow on the first attempt, but as a person who has read the novel multiple times, I know anyone who gives themselves over to the themes will find a relentless grim vision of evil that cannot be escaped once it takes over your mind. This novel is a powerful allegory for PKD’s fears about the illusion of reality, the addiction to drugs, and an evil god who has power over your mind. As Phil said: “In my novel (TSPE), which is a study of absolute evil, the protagonist, after his encounter with Eldritch, returns to Earth and dictates a memo. This little section appears ahead of the text of the novel. It is the novel, actually, this paragraph; the rest is a sort of post-mortem, or rather, a flashback in which all that came to produce the one-paragraph book is presented.”

This opening paragraph has a page to itself.

“I mean, after all; you have to consider, we’re only made out of dust. That’s admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn’t forget that. But even considering, I mean it’s a sort of bad beginning, we’re not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we’re faced with we can make it. You get me?”

While the dust wins in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the evil god of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch promises truth and salvation, but once you are trapped with him in the illusion there is no escape. No talisman, wooden stake or magic can free you. There is a chapter where a character keeps believing that he has escaped the simulation but no matter how he tries, Eldritch is there, always watching him.

Dick said of this book: “I enjoyed writing all of them . . . But this leaves out the most vital of them all: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I am afraid of that book; it deals with absolute evil, and I wrote it during a great crisis in my religious beliefs. I decided to write a novel dealing with absolute evil as personified in the form of a ‘human.’ When the galleys came from Doubleday I couldn’t correct them because I could not bear to read the text, and this is still true.”

The ultimate villain, Palmer Eldritch, is a virus. “What we have here is not an invasion of Earth by Proxmen being from another system. Not an invasion by legions of a pseudo-human race. No, it’s Palmer Eldritch who’s everywhere, growing and growing like a mad weed.”

Philip K. Dick is not a horror writer, but this novel is as much a horror novel as it is science fiction—maybe more horror than anything SF. Horror readers looking for science fiction that brings fear while expanding their perceptions of reality cannot go wrong with PKD.

Novels with Horror Themes