A Scanner Darkly

Philip K. Dick

What happens when an undercover narc agent is assigned to monitor his own druggie persona? A Scanner Darkly is an insider's look at the world of illegal drug use.

A genius inventor has invented an image scramble suit that keeps the wearer from being identified by anyone. Fred is an undercover narcotics agents who wears one whenever on duty. Even his immediate supervisors don't know who he is.

In his every day world, he is Bob Arctor, a druggie who shares a house with two friends, also druggies, as well as their circle of friends. They are addicted to a number of illegal drugs, the worse being Substance D. Substance D destroys the brain slowly but completely. The men shift between friendship and paranoia. One man is sure there are bugs all around him that never go away. Another destroys his friend's machinery, then tries to help fix it. Another wanders around knowing he should get help, but can't make that step. And the story continues.

Arctor gets money from the government to make drug buys to appear to be a potential dealer. Most of the drugs are then turned over to the government. But he takes them as well, to keep his cover intact. The goal isn't to catch the user like his friends, or even the small dealers. Law enforcement wants to dig up the chain until the producer of Substance D can be caught and stopped.

Philip K. Dick lived in this world of drug use and abuse. A Scanner Darkly isn't imagination, but a portrait of the people he knew. He used his unusual view of the world to take his friends and lifestyle and put them into an intriguing, slightly macabre, and darkly humorous book. The twist at the end only skews things more.

The beginning of A Scanner Darkly is confusing and is hard to get started in the book. It never grabs the reader. Instead, the writing works insiduously, so the reader is caught up and tangled into Dick's world.

In his afterward, Dick says the book isn't supposed to moralistic or judgmental. Instead, it is a recounting of the life around him with a science fiction bent - the scramble suit. It ends with a list of friends who were caught up in the lifestyle and what happened to them. Most of them are dead. That list alone turns A Scanner Darkly into a cautionary story.

Notice:  Suggestive dialogue or situations