A SCANNER DARKLY

A marrow-freezing morality play set in a 1994 California. The central fact of life is drugs: every hard drug in the current lexicon plus Substance D—"Death" to its friends—which progressively impairs coordination between the brain's two hemispheres. The hero is an addict, a nark engaged in surreptitious electronic "scanning" of himself and friends, and—it slowly becomes clear—a patsy in some dreadful hidden game. Dick has bitten off an awful lot here. Much of the straightforward narration is theatrically bad, yet dialogue and internal monologue carry a cruel (and cruelly funny) conviction. And the larger plot is brilliantly hinged upon a consciousness split by two insanities: the Kafkaesque charade of secret self-surveillance and the terrible advance of irreversible brain damage. Flawed, almost too grim to take, but stunningly realized.