Thinking of the Dark Scanner

I liked Bob Einstein's write up of PKD's A Scanner Darkly, mainly because it made me feel as if I should give the book another shot. It's wasn't one of my favorite PKD novels, and I'm not sure I could ever articulate why. The story was brilliant enough: in a nutshell, a drug addicted undercover cop with a split identity is assigned to spy on himself. If I remember correctly, my main issues with the story were the unrelentingly grim paranoia combined with an increasingly unhinged writing style (which here Einstein describes as "valuing the cultivation of uncertain aspects of the story from the vantage of writer as artist, free from the convolution of a pre-established conclusion and the plot points building to that (showcased with devices like foreshadowing)"). Regardless, I really should give it another go, given how much I love the twisted ideas and brain-fucks of his other novels. (If you want a real brain twister, pick up UBIK. Like, yesterday.) It was also made into an interpolated-rotoscoping animation movie made by Richard Linklater, which always intrigued me, since it's hard enough to follow the plot in the book, much less a movie.

Anyways, Einstein has some thought provoking things to say about the book, including this gem, which IMO is spot on:

"A Scanner Darkly" tells the story of a motley group of bums and burn outs the likes of which I've never seen before. Think if The Whole Sick Crew of Thomas Pynchon's "V." were given a follow up, set somewhere ambiguous in the future.