A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick
First off, if you have young children, and they aren’t already conversant with some of the darker sides of the world we live in, I’d want to read the book before okaying it for them.
That said, I liked this book. I had heard the PK Dick’s other books weren’t very well written, and somewhat over-hyped, so to be honest, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of this novel. The main plot outline is that a narcotics undercover police officer is tasked with placing a suspect drug dealer under surveillance. No problems so far… The dealer lives in a house, and has some other drug taking friends, who the narc befriends, in an effort to get closer to his target. Quite a lot of the plot is filled with the strange, sometime funny, often poignant, occasionally miserable trails and tribulations any hard-drug addict has to go through to get his next fix.
As the reader you gradually begin to realise that something isn’t quite right with the narc vs. dealer situation. Someone isn’t who they are pretending to be…