The mind-bending novels of Philip K. Dick transcend genre to explore the nature of consciousness and reality, placing ordinary men and women in congress with the unknowable and the awe-full. Valis, the first in Dick's final trio of novels, is a theological detective story in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime. The schizophrenic hero, a Dick alter-ego named Horselover Fat, begins receiving revelatory visions through a burst of pink laser light. As a coterie of religious seekers forms to explore these messages, they are led to a rock musician's estate, where a two-year old Messianic figure named Sophia confirms that an ancient, mechanical intelligence orbiting the earth has been guiding their discoveries. Mixing Gnostic Christianity with Dick's own strange philosophy, Valis is as funny and surprising as it is eye-opening.
