I bought this at Troubled Sleep, a nice local bookstore with lots of used literary fiction. They had a funny selection of Philip K Dick novels: lots of the back catalogue and few of the hits. But I was planning on reading some PKD after he had been mentioned as a good supplement to Ted Chiang, one of my favorite authors.
This is my first Philip K Dick book. It's his last, published posthumously and nine years after its writing.
It was a fun read, but I believe the reviews that say it's not his best work. Especially the ending has a very stitched-together feeling. I was surprised by how self-referential it is - Dick himself is one of the main characters, and makes reference to his other writing in the fictional universe of the book.
The story is about a chaotic and fascist president taking over America and a mysterious resistance to his efforts: plenty of resonance with our recent political history. The allegories and jokes are heavily underlined in this one.
What I liked most was the degree to which it bought into the paranoia and hallucination of the main characters, which mirrors the breaking of society around them: there's a bit of legitimate mystery around what's actually true and what's fantasy that seems very relatable in a post-Nixon world of lunacy.