As usual, Phillip K. Dick has left me with spirally eyes and a whirring brain. I'd like to give a plot summary, but I'll let someone else do that and egotistically save this space for my own musings: http://www.philipkdickfans.com/ttsopa... There are summaries I found that I like better, but this one provides a useful foil against which to formulate my own thoughts about this book, which rather has my mind tied in knots. To start with, I don't see the book's theme as revolving around drugs and hallucinations, cut and dry. Rather, I see it as questioning the relationship between a drug experience or hallucination and a bona fide religious experience. This reader saw Can-D as the "mere" drug, the one reliant on Perky Pat mini-worlds and the one where the drug experience is clearly demarcated from and never confused with the "real" world. In contrast, Palmer Eldritch's Chew-Z provides a fundamentally different experience. Takers of Chew-Z (and Dick's readers, once the substance has been taken by two main characters, Leo Bulero and Barney Mayerson) cannot separate the drug experience from reality. They do not simply wake up from their trip (or "translation" as Dick has it) and leave it behind. The drug punches a hole in the usually non-permeable layer between hallucination and reality. In the end this confusion of hallucination and reality only poses the question of whether what we call hallucination is not true reality, and sobriety (or "reality") the veil we cast over it so that we don't go bonkers by embracing the truth, the *really* real. Leo's and Barney's Chew-Z experiences are hellish, and other users describe their experiences the same way because in each case, for each person, Palmer Eldritch seems to be in control of their hallucination, in control of the world in which they find themselves. And when they think they've awoken from the trip, it is only to have friends or coworkers suddenly morph into Eldritch (they appear with Eldritch's prostheses, his three distinctive physical, and nonbiological traits - his three stigmata), demonstrating that users are still in the thrall of Chew-Z...and of Eldritch who, we grow to understand, is not the man who left earth 10 years ago, but some entity controlling his body and perpetuating itself through the use of Chew-Z. As Barney Mayerson comes to understand (or believe he understands - and I'm inclined to agree with him), the thing occupying Eldritch is outside of time and indescribably ancient. It falls so beyond human understanding that the closest way Barney, an atheist, can describe it is through reference to God. I wish I had the book here in front of me and I'd quote, but I have to paraphrase - humans call it God, because they need something to call it, but it's beyond understanding simply on the merit of being so damned old, so damned different from humans. This is also the reason Eldritch and the Chew-Z "translations" come across as hellish - they are simply so alien from humanity as to feel palpably "other", positively ahuman - and part of their alien-ness is a kind of amorality, which is not to be confused with immorality. The Eldritch-creature wishes no harm (no spiritual harm, physical harm is another matter), but perhaps doesn't know how to do good, in our common human sense of the word. The final fascinating thoughts on this topic go to Anne Hathaway, a neo-Christian colonist on Mars, who instructs Barney about ontology - you must not confuse the pot with the potter, she warns him. Do not confuse the creation with the creator, the matter with the substance, the vessel with the contents. And I suppose that's all meant to imply that even the stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are just vessels in that metaphor, containing something we really can't describe or ever know. Even when we've brushed right up against it and are only separated from it by the thinnest of membranes.