Sunday, May 24, 2026
Book Review: The Franchise by Thomas Elrod
Book Review: AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan
480 pages, Hardcover
Published, 2021 by Crown Currency
Full review and podcast coverage coming...
Book Review: Acquired Taste Clay McLeod Chapman
Acquired Taste by Clay McLeod Chapman
304 pages, Hardcover
Published September, 2025 by Titan Books
I have an interesting relationship with this author as a reader. My personal experience with Chapman is limited; we met briefly when Stokercon was here in San Diego. I was familiar with his work and enjoyed interviews with him on various podcasts. Once, a friend asked if I had read his work, and I said not much, but he has been on my podcast. In my memory, I have a distinct memory of talking with him. I clearly remembered a story he told about working at Dairy Queen there is just one problem. He was never on my podcast. I did hear him on other podcasts, for some reason I was convinced I spoke with him at length when I didn’t.
I know that is weird. But it is what it is. CMC has a very intense persona, and it feels like he is always putting on a show. This is a great way to stand out as a writer, I enjoy writers like Harlan Ellison, Cody Goodfellow, or Brian Keene who have made larger-than-life personas about themselves. What is important is that they are natural about it. I get the sense from CMC that he loves all this business, and that love comes off the page in interesting ways.
Horror in mundane things, and lots of horrible things happening to babies. Baby Carrots was my favorite, and I also enjoyed the very political pieces like Spew of the News. And the last story about Nathan Ballingrud I liked the stories that had real personality, and I think that is what makes this collection stand out. Tales like Baby Carrots feel very one of a kind, the work of a unique voice. What more can you ask for in a collection?
Book Review: Monsters in Archive by Caroline Bicks
304 pages, Hardcover
Published April, 2026 by Hogarth
I am interviewing Caroline on the Live PKD hangout Tuesday, June 23. JOIN US!
I somehow missed the initial roll-out of this book until a member of PKD weekly hangouts, Nick McCracken, mentioned that it was a book he had been reading. I ordered before he was done talking about reading it. Bicks is an academic with one of the coolest job titles in the known universe…The Stephen E. King chair of the English department at King’s alma mater, the University of Maine.
So the idea with this book is that the Bicks was given a year to dig around the various papers collected in the Stephen King archives. So she gives us a deep look into Night Shift, the first three novels, and Pet Sematary. This includes information about various drafts, editorial notes, and insights from correspondence between King and Bicks.
I am an archive nerd, so this book was made for me. I have dug around the Philip K. Dick papers, the Gene Roddenberry papers, and more. So my interest in this book and Bick's progress was personal. Not only have I been reading SK since IT was a new release, but those early years' books are special to me.
So my copy of Monsters in Archives is dog-eared and yellow-highlighted. One of the things that makes this book special is that it takes us under the hood of these books. Authors have this experience working with editors when we go deep, talking about word choices. On page 58 we see a great example. The famous line from Pet Semetary, “Sometimes Dead is better.” Bicks can show us where he had Death and, with a pencil, crossed it out and handwrote dead. I had a similar experience with the manuscript of A Scanner Darkly (PKD) when the year of the novel was 1984 and was scratched out for 94 in the 1977 SF novel.
MITA is filled with moments like this, differences between Second Coming and Salem’s Lot, The Shine and the Shining. Choices to make: The events in room 217 are less gruesome, early college drafts of Night Shift, and more. The masterclass of Danny Glick at the window. All stuff explored in such detail, constant readers will be delighted to learn about them. It is a great under-the-hood look at one of the most important writers of the 20th century.
Book Review: Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia Zoë Perry (Translator)
Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia (Zoe Perry Translator)
99 pages, Paperback
Published April, 2023 by Charco Press (First published in Brazil in 2013)
I don't remember how I found this book. It showed up in my library holds, and I vaguely remembered that the author was compared to a Brazilian Cormac McCarthy. The comparison to an excellent and yet deeply masculine writer was interesting, but considering the topic and title, this vegan was a bit worried about the subject matter. It certainly was dark and triggered me many times. I actually don´t want to think about what it says about someone who is not triggered by this story.
McCarthy is a good comparison here. Dark, unsettling story about working-class farmhands in rural Brazil. Maia certainly invokes a dark countryside not unlike McCarthy’s Appalachia, more brutally depicted in Child of God. It is the story of a slaughterhouse, and as you read, you can feel the heat, sweat, and almost smell the sour rot of death. I am already of the opinion that these are places of nightmare, and since I have not eaten animals in decades, maybe this hits me differently.
The prose translated by Zoe Perry is very well composed; it makes for a weird contrast. The novella is beautifully written, but disgusting and awful in setting and events.
Edgar, the main character, is thoughtful but…
“What's it like killing cattle all day long? Don't you think this is murder? Don't you think slaughtering these animals is a crime?”
Edgar turns towards the voice and comes face to face with a pair of eyes with dilated pupils protected by thick, red-rimmed glasses. The young woman, dressed in a long skirt and a white down blouse, constantly makes notes in a black notebook. Edgar looks at her two-tone, black and brown leather shoes. They have a silver buckle on the side, they're delicate and clean, he thinks of Vera Gun's daughter, who needs glasses for her bad eyes
“I do.”
What does it mean that the character we follow or are meant to empathize with is just fine with casual murder? It is not just cattle but the river, and the planet. They know it.
“Death is laying waste to the river,” says Bronco Gill, evoking his ancestors with a little prayer, mumbling softly. “It's like a curse. A very evil spirit walks in these waters,” he concludes.
I was glad that the novel reminded readers that they play a role. If you eat me, it is your dollars that force men like Edgar to pull the trigger.
“Somebody’s got to do the dirty work. Other people’s dirty work. Nobody wants to do that sort of thing. That’s why God put guys like you and me on this earth.”
He is OK with that, and that was hard for me to read. This novella is not preachy, but it hits the truth. It is my review that was preachy. Those are the moments that stand out to me. This book reminded me that I want to be clear. Meat is murder.
Book Review: Philip K. Dick and the World We Live In by Evan Lampe
396 pages, Paperback
Published: 2015 by Wide Books
In the early days of the Dickheads podcast I found Evan Lampe’s solo podcast covering PKD. Many of the episodes shared the same research DNA as this book, and I suspect if I were to go back and listen, you could hear Evan forming his ideas. It is a treat of these types of podcasts, our first episodes of Dickheads I knew hardly anything. Evan’s journey on the podcast is more than a decade ago, but here is where he is now…
This book is in the limited sub-category of non-fiction titles about Philip K. Dick by folks who have read the entire canon. It compares nicely to Palmer’s PKD Exhilaration and Terror, Rossi’s Twisted Worlds of PKD, and most recently Lapoujade’s Worlds Built to Fall Apart.
There are several reasons you can accuse me of bias. Evan was a long-time guest on my podcast, but more importantly, I share much of his negative view of Capitalism. One person told me they were afraid that the book was all Marxist politics, but it is actually more Kropotkin than old Karl. He is a trained labor historian, so it is going to happen. I love a PKD book that quotes from The Conquest of Bread. It was also interesting timing because Ray Nayler’s Palaces of the Crow (my favorite new release) also quoted the old anarchist theorist.
The gist of the skepticism is that a radical left narrative based on PKD’s canon might seem off. After Thomas Disch called Phil a Marxist, he was mad and often pointed to the Man Who Japed as supercritical of Chinese communism. Lampe’s argument for anti-capitalist leanings might have gotten the same reaction out of Phil that Disch got, but it is well-sourced. Just as PKD’s fiction presented animal rights ideals he didn’t live up to, tons of political and social concepts came out of the 44 novels and 120 short stories, and no one has done a more top-to-bottom look at the ouvre that Lampe has here.
So what was the intention…
“What I hope to do in this book is offer Dick as a potential guide to currently existing late capitalism. My hope is that this may make Philip K Dick less of a prophet and more of a companion as we face the increasingly bleak and horrifying future that goes beyond just the condition of the postmodern and the posthuman that seems to sap our very freedoms.”
I found every chapter meaningful and helpful, but let's go a little deeper.
The first chapter, which is about the end of work, becomes even more interesting considering how much we are debating the loss of work. It was fine when the lower classes were losing hard labor jobs, but now that the middle class and even some upper class are losing wages to computers, the debate is becoming important. A decade ahead, Lampe wisely points to when PKD jumped into this debate in the 50’s. There is a sub-chapter devoted a story written in 1953. For the morality of technological post-scarcity, “To Serve the Master.” Lampe highlights how PKD weighs into the ethics of scarcity and machine workforces. This post-war tale is set after a conflict between Leisurists (who want computers to do everything) and moralists.
That chapter, combined with The Tragedy of Post Scarcity: A Detailed Look at the Crack in Space are great examples of the strength of the book. Deep cut stories and a novel that is admittedly not a high point in PKD’s career get as much attention as the masterpieces. He highlights not just the messages and themes, but PKD’s growth, for example, how the expanded Penultimate Truth develops a smarter and more thoughtful political stance over the source short story The Defenders, a decade earlier. The early version seems to show the robots deciding on their own to keep humans underground, but the novel shows a ruling elite of tech oligarchs who control the robots. (Sound familiar?)
Another chapter I thought was one of the best, The Empire Never Died: The search for order, political power, and global capitalism. Stretching from Stability written when he was a teenager to High Castle and The Zap Gun this chapter looks at the forces of political power in PKD’s fiction. It is worth the book alone.
One of the best and most in-depth chapters is Window Shopping at the Commissary: Consumerism, Conformity, and Power. Here, Lampe veers into something that affected me because I just read Christopher Palmer’s book. One of the new Ideas for me in that book is how PKD writes about consumption. Lampe expands on this and ties to left-leaning political takes on deep cut stories.
A subchapter on war and consumption, for example, looks closely at a deep cut short story, Some Kinds of Life, Autofac, and Foster You're dead in just one subchapter. Even deeper cut stories like Service Call and the Little Movement are mentioned alongside novels like Now Wait for Last Year, that's a lot of titles, but it shows you how deep cut this book goes
One of the directions of Lampe’s ideas I have not seen elsewhere is in chapter The Significance of the Frontier in Martian history Philip K Dick meets Frederick Jackson Turner. On the podcast for years, whenever I brought up the frontier, I always referenced Lampe. I think his writings here are something no one has really dived into as deeply.
A few of Evan’s appearances on DHP:
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