Meh, not my favorite PKD. "Drug books" are hard to write well, and this one is interesting but just doesn't come off very well. At some level, even in a drug book incoherence can be problematic, as it is here, for me. It just kind of bounces around, I don't really understand the society he constructs (it's not quite late 70s Marin, or putative late 70s LA), don't quite get inside the characters sufficiently, don't particularly for whatever they're raving about, don't perceive any productive narrative tension.

It's certainly interesting. For example, the metanarrative, which he doesn't quite pull off, that the same folks producing Death are the ones actively criminalizing it, that the lines between the ones selling, using and policing (both strictu sensu and at the broader societal level), punishing and treating the victims of the drug are nebulous, is a very promising line. But he just never manages to focus on it. This might be a more general problem with PKD, for me as a reader - a million amazing and totally unique ideas, but squirrely narratives.

I didn't hate it. It just didn't work that well, for me. It'll leave you smarter than when you started, which is really the rock bottom litmus test, so I won't encourage you not to read it, but will just say there are lots of other things I might pick up first.