Just Finished Reading Out of Their Minds by Clifford Simak

Out of Their Minds is a short 1970 novel by one of my favorite science fictions writers, the late Clifford Simak.  Unfortunately, the basis for this story by now is well-trodden and old: the notion that people's collective thoughts can generate a new type of sentient life that takes the forms of our imagined symbols and characters, both from fiction and from history, albeit transformed by culture into something quite different from the truth.  Horton Smith is a news reporter returning to his rural hometown to seclude himself in order to write a book.  He finds himself undergoing bizarre encounters such as a triceratops dinosaur charging him on the road or the comic strip characters Snuffy and Loweezy Smith inviting him to stay overnight.  A friend who had discovered the source of the manifestations has died in a mysterious, unexplained auto crash, and Horton realizes that he, too, is targeted for death by the "imagined" entities after he reads his buddy's papers...the race is on to warn the authorities in Washington: but will they listen to him or just laugh him off?

This story lays out many different fictional and real characters and settings in the context of collective imagination...the idea that thinking something makes it come into being sounded to me derivative of the older Star Trek episode Shore Leave as well as the 1973 chilling Harlan Ellison horror short story The Whimper of Whipped Dogs, Tad Williams' incredible four-part sci-fi Otherland series (albeit in a virtual reality context), Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods...and naturally that three-part South Park episode titled "Imaginationland".  Still, although it isn't one of my favorite Simak stories, I liked Out of Their Minds but think it would have been more effective on film or television.  I think I'll continue rummaging through this master of science fiction's works in search of something better, though...