Philip K. Dick's The Cosmic Puppets

Many years ago, there was a TV movie starring Martin Landau titled Welcome Home, Johnny Bristol. In it, a weary Vietnam ex-POW decides to go back to the beloved little town in Vermont where he grew up, see some of the old faces, and see how much things had changed (or hadn't). The only problem is that he can find no trace of this town's existence, either in the present or the past. Ultimately, this mystery is resolved with a pretty ordinary explanation. Philip K. Dick's relatively short novel The Cosmic Puppets creates a similar scenario. Only here, the town is in a remote Virginian valley and the story's resolution is quite cosmic in nature.

The protagonist is Ted Barton, recently married and passing on through to visit his childhood town of Millgate, Virginia. When he reaches it, he discovers that everything has changed, even retroactively, with a completely different history. The people are all different, the streets are all different, and all the town's buildings and landmarks are different. Barton decides to stay in town for a few days in order to sort out this mystery. And discovers two children who seem to be engaged in a life-and-death struggle against each other, using bees, rats, spiders snakes, and even animated clay models (called "golems" here) as surrogate spies and soldiers. Barton becomes entangled in their conflict. Which turns out to be anything but local.

The Cosmic Puppets was an early science fiction novel of Philip K. Dick, written in 1953. Only 143 pages in length, I read it by just stopping by at a local bookstore and reading a few pages at a time (it wasn't available at my local public library). Another writer such as Stephen King probably could have taken this story's premise and expanded it into an 800-page novel. Which he did with other ideas in novels like Desperation, The Regulators, and Insomnia (another "cosmic" thriller). But as I have said before, part of Philip K. Dick's appeal to me is the relative terseness of his writings. And The Cosmic Puppets is about as terse as they come! A worthwhile read, even if you have to shell out some money for it.

The next novel of Philip K. Dick that I am reading is another of his "reality" stories, titled Puttering About in a Small Land. So far, it seems to me to be his best work of this genre, and I am looking forward to reviewing it in the near future.