The Father-Thing

by Philip K. Dick

In The Father-Thing, a young boy named Charlie discovers that the man he has believed to be his father is actually not his real father. The man who comes home from work, kisses his mother, sits down to dinner, makes comments about his day and the like may look like the actual Mr. Walton, but Charlie knows better. Charlie alone knows the real and hideous secret--that his real father has been killed and that the being pretending to be his father is actually an alien that has taken over his body and usurped his father's life. It is no longer Charlie's father; instead, it is the "Father-Thing".

The Father-Thing is a familiar premise, especially popular in the 1950s, that continues to hold our interest. It expresses the fear that people are not what they appear to be on the surface. The idea is that something sinister may be lurking beneath the facade of suburban complacency. And here, Dick's story has a more personal focus than most.

This story focuses not on the invasion of a whole community but instead on the invasion of one particular family. The alien takeover serves as a metaphor for estrangement. The Father-Thing represents the seemingly inscrutable motives that can undermine and damage one family's household and stability. Dick's story, then, is both a chilling science fiction tale and an emotionally resonant work about a child's coming to terms with the turmoil within his own family. Where Charlie turns when he finds himself outcast from his own home is somewhat surprising and reveals a great deal about Dick's ideas about community and exile.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Horror, American, Ebooks

15 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 1954

About the author

Philip Kindred Dick was a prolific American science fiction author whose work has had a lasting impact on literature, cinema, and popular culture. Known for his imaginative narratives and profound philosophical themes, Dick explored the nature of reality, the boundaries of human identity, and the impact of technology and authoritarianism on society. His stories often blurred the line between the real and the artificial, challenging readers to question their perceptions and beliefs.
Raised in California, Dick began writing professionally in the early 1950s, publishing short stories in various science fiction magazines. He quickly developed a distinctive voice within the genre, marked by a fusion of science fiction concepts with deep existential and psychological inquiry. Over his career, he authored 44 novels and more than 100 short stories, many of which have become classics in the field.
Recurring themes in Dick's work include alternate realities, simulations, corporate and government control, mental illness, and the nature of consciousness. His protagonists are frequently everyday individuals—often paranoid, uncertain, or troubled—caught in surreal and often dangerous circumstances that force them to question their environment and themselves. Works such as Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and A Scanner Darkly reflect his fascination with perception and altered states of consciousness, often drawing from his own experiences with mental health struggles and drug use.
One of Dick’s most influential novels is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which served as the basis for Ridley Scott’s iconic film Blade Runner. The novel deals with the distinction between humans and artificial beings and asks profound questions about empathy, identity, and what it means to be alive. Other adaptations of his work include Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle, each reflecting key elements of his storytelling—uncertain realities, oppressive systems, and the search for truth. These adaptations have introduced his complex ideas to audiences well beyond the traditional readership of science fiction.
In the 1970s, Dick underwent a series of visionary and mystical experiences that had a significant influence on his later writings. He described receiving profound knowledge from an external, possibly divine, source and documented these events extensively in what became known as The Exegesis, a massive and often fragmented journal. These experiences inspired his later novels, most notably the VALIS trilogy, which mixes autobiography, theology, and metaphysics in a narrative that defies conventional structure and genre boundaries.
Throughout his life, Dick faced financial instability, health issues, and periods of personal turmoil, yet he remained a dedicated and relentless writer. Despite limited commercial success during his lifetime, his reputation grew steadily, and he came to be regarded as one of the most original voices in speculative fiction. His work has been celebrated for its ability to fuse philosophical depth with gripping storytelling and has influenced not only science fiction writers but also philosophers, filmmakers, and futurists.
Dick’s legacy continues to thrive in both literary and cinematic spheres. The themes he explored remain urgently relevant in the modern world, particularly as technology increasingly intersects with human identity and governance. The Philip K. Dick Award, named in his honor, is presented annually to distinguished works of science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. His writings have also inspired television series, academic studies, and countless homages across media.
Through his vivid imagination and unflinching inquiry into the nature of existence, Philip K. Dick redefined what science fiction could achieve. His work continues to challenge and inspire, offering timeless insights into the human condition a

Reviews

[Bionic Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

What if people are not what they seem to be? How could we know if they had been replaced with something alien?

I remember the first time I read this story. I was a teenager, and it sent shivers down my spine. Although it seemed an outrageous premise, still it seemed to create that chilling feeling of fear, of what if? How do we ever really know that the person we are speaking to, is the same person we think we know. How do we know what they are thinking, or what they are. Are they really like me?

And at the time, these in-between years of questioning everything, solipsistic thoughts were uppermost, shortly followed by a fear of alienation, of difference, of sensing an “other”, of not knowing what is “real”. Trying to make sense of the world, and of myself in it.

The Father-Thing, a 1954 short story by the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, taps into those thoughts and feelings. Around the same time that I read it, I also watched the original 1956 film of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” on television. It gripped and terrified me. That film, and the 1978 remake, are still two of my favourites. Only recently have I learned that Philip K. Dick’s story The Father-Thing had inspired the film. I was also addicted to an American TV series called “The Invaders”, from 1967-8, where ordinary people were gradually being taken over by aliens. This was easy, since the aliens looked identical to the original, and only one man—our hero, David Vincent—knew this:

“Somehow he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun.”

For a Science Fiction series it must have been quite cheap to make, as the only way you could tell by sight that someone was an alien, was by their deformed little finger, which could not move and was bent at an unnatural angle!

I never realised at the time that all these stories were rooted in the US paranoia about Communist infiltration, from the McCarthy era a good decade or more earlier. And yet looking back, much of the USA Science fiction of that time seems paranoic, and about alien invasions. It forms a sub-genre.

Both “The Invaders” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” broadened out the concept of the original short story. They address aspects of society which were only briefly hinted at by Philip K. Dick. The original story was first and foremost about an invasion of a family, and not really extended to a community, never mind a country, or the world.

The Father-Thing is often included in SF anthologies, but first reached the public in December of 1954, published in the magazine “Fantasy and Science Fiction”. It is told from the point of view of Charlie Walton, a young 8 year old boy, who discovers that the man he has believed to be his father is not his real father. He—it—is not even human. The man looks like his father, comes home from work, talks to Charlie and his mother about everyday things, and sits down to dinner. He looks and sounds exactly like Mr. Walton. Even Charlie’s mother seems to think this is her husband, but Charlie senses—knows—otherwise. This is the Father-thing, an alien imposter.

It is every child’s nightmare, the loss of a parent they love. So is it merely fantasy—a fabrication? Is Charlie trying to make sense of an impending divorce? (Indeed, when the story was recently dramatised for Channel 4’s 2017 series “Electric Dreams”, this aspect was explored.) But no, we see in Philip K. Dick’s story that it isn’t anything so comparatively ordinary. This is something far more earth-shattering. And what does a child do, if one parent has been replaced by the father-thing, and his other parent does not believe him? As Philip K. Dick said:

“Kids understand: they are wiser than adults.”

Sent to the garage by his mother to tell his father that dinner is ready, Charlie blurts out that he doesn’t know which of them to tell. There are two of them, and they both look alike. His mother, June, begins to get annoyed, but then Ted Walton comes striding into the kitchen. At least …

Why is Charlie so tense, sitting bolt upright, with his face as white as chalk? He is watching the man who has just come in:

“Ted jerked. A strange expression flitted across his face. It vanished at once, but in the brief instant Ted Walton’s face lost all familiarity. Something alien and cold gleamed out, a twisting, wriggling mass.”

Charlie, small as he is tries to challenge this father-thing, but then beats a hasty retreat to his room … except that the father-thing follows him.

What choice does Charlie have? He has to know, or perhaps more urgently, he has to hide. He climbs out of the window in his room, and makes his way to the garage. What he finds there may terrify you. Or if you find you are more involved with the paranoiac suggestion and suspense of this story; the idea that a child may see with clear eyes, what is right in front of him, although nobody else can, the story from now on may seem gratuitously graphic.

In the garage, among the spiders, Charlie finds a barrel filled with dead leaves and old magazines. Deep in the barrel, Charles finds it:

“It still looked a little like his father, enough for him to recognise. He had found it—and the sight made him sick at his stomach … In the barrel were the remains of his real father, his real father. Bits the father-thing had no use for. Bits it had discarded … they were dry … like a discarded snake skin, flaky and crumbling, rustling at the touch. An empty skin …This was all the father-thing had left; it had eaten the rest. Taken the insides—and his father’s place.”

But the horror is not yet over, because the father-thing is coming towards the garage. Charles runs. Where he runs to is unexpected.

Charles goes to find an older 14 year old kid, Tony Peretti, who lives nearby. Of course Tony finds it hard to believe, especially since the two are not particular friends. Tony had even beaten him up once. In fact he’d beaten up almost every kid in the neighbourhood at one time or another. But Tony listens to Charles’s story, and arms himself with a BB gun before going back with him to the Waltons’ home. Tony still does not really believe there is anything wrong, until Charles shows him the remains of his real father in the garage, spreading out the crumbling pieces of dried out skin, until Tony can see what it used to be:

“The remains were colourless. Almost transparent. An amber yellow, thin as paper. Dry and utterly lifeless.”

Charles is near to tears, but tells Tony that he had seen the two of them talking to each other. The “father-thing” must have eaten his father when Charles went back inside the house.

Together they go to Charles’s house and look through the window, where the couple are arguing. June is worrying about where Charles has got to, and says she is going to ask the neighbours.

“As soon as Mrs. Walton was gone from the room, the father-thing sagged in its chair. It became limp. Its mouth fell open. Its eyes peered vacantly. Its head fell forward, like a discarded rag doll.”

It has slumped down limply, as if someone had turned it off. Tony Peretti knows what this means. The father-thing is controlled from somewhere else. The two boys want to locate what force is controlling the father-thing, and Charles thinks he knows someone who might be able to help them. They go to find Bobby Daniels, “a little black kid” they both know, who Charles says is “the best” neighbourhood at “finding.”

The third boy, Bobby, is about Charles’s age and says he can’t stay out long; he has to go to bed soon. They search all round the scrub area at the back of the house, for something alien which might be controlling the father-thing. Bobby finds a kind of insect, with:

“a metallic body. An thin jointed thing with endless crooked legs … digging frantically. Plated, like an ant; a red-brown bug that disappeared before their eyes. Its rows of legs scabbed and clutched … Its wicked-looking tail twisted furiously as it struggled down the tunnel it had made.”

They manage to shoot it with the BB gun, several times, and hit it with a rake, but it is useless. The thing seems to get inside their brains somehow, and make them confused. Just as they are considering other ways of killing it, Charles is grabbed by the father-thing, who says he is taking him home for a spanking. It had been watching them all along.

The father-thing leads Charles to the garage, calling out to Charles’s mother to go inside, and that he would take care of it. Once inside, Tony Peretti shoots the father-thing in the eye, but the father-thing snatches the gun away from him, while Charles makes his escape into the nearby small bamboo grove. The father-thing follows. It is only a matter of time.

But inside the grove Charles finds:

“A shape, a silent unmoving shape that grew up from the mound of filth like some nocturnal mushroom. A white column, a pulp mass that glistened moistly in the moonlight. Webs covered it, a mouldy cocoon. It had vague arms and legs. An indistinct half-shaped head. As yet the features hadn’t formed.”

Even so, Charles can tell what it is: a “mother-thing” in the final stages of maturation, and behind it are “other pulpy white larvae, recently laid by the bug. Small. Just coming into existence.”

There is a small one.

“The Charles-thing”.

And as it totters out of its cocoon, aided by the father-thing, the small one reaches out greedily for Charles. But suddenly both bugs fall silent and still. The other two boys are coming up the driveway towards Charles. Tony Peretti explains that little Bobby Daniels had killed it by pouring kerosene in its tunnel, just as he said they killed mosquitoes, where he used to live in Virginia.

What makes this story stand apart for me, from other invasion and replacement types of story, is the small suburban setting, and the very real tension in one family. Also, the idea that Charles’s father is split into two very different parts—a father and a “father-thing”—must be something many children secretly suspect. Children witness their parents in all sorts of moods; sometimes clearly full of love, and at others suffused by anger. Philip K. Dick remembered this fear well from his own childhood. He wrote:

“I always had the impression, when I was very small, that my father was two people, one good, one bad.”

What I also like very much about this story is the loyalty, teamwork and bravery shown by three boys who, at first sight, do not have much in common. One is six years older than the other. One is known as a bad sort—a bully. One is black (please remember this is 1954 America!) yet this one, also the youngest, shows the most initiative.

For me these aspects make up for the sight personal drawbacks to the story: the “Boys Own” feel, allied with a slightly overwritten Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraftian tendency to lean towards the ability to nauseate, revolt and disgust, rather than to create a feeling of fear. (There is nothing that would not seem tame by current horror novel standards, however. It is just that my personal preference is for suggestion, atmosphere, and a slow build-up of tension, resulting in the monsters (either literal, or “monsters from the Id”) my own imagination will conjure up.)

As mentioned earlier, this episode was adapted in 2017 for the “Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams” TV series, and I have read the original story again, as part of the collection published to accompany it. The title was kept, but aspects of the story were changed for modern-day TV.

The possible theme about a child fearing the loss of a parent because of divorce became a reality. The episode was set in a Chicago suburb, rather than unspecified suburbia, and 8 year old Charles is now 11 year old Charlie. He lives with his father and mother, who no longer get on with each other each other. They both still love Charlie of course, so his dad offers to live in the garage, just so he can still be around and neither need say anything about their looming divorce.

The cast is much larger too, than the claustrophobic original. There are Charlie’s friends, Dylan’s older brother Henry, a large part played by Charlie’s teacher Mr. Dick, the police, and a large set piece at the end, with Charlie amassing support via modern technology, rather than the more intimate, underplayed ending of the original story, The Father-Thing.

In the TV episode, Charlie and his dad are on a camping trip, chatting about baseball, and his father buying Charlie all the treats his mother won’t usually allow, when strange meteors begin to crash to Earth. They have an intense encounter with—someone—with a dead-eyed piercing stare. He seems to be a deer hunter, but something must be terribly wrong, because people all around town begin to behave a little strangely.

What? Is this the same story? Yes, it is, but as with about half this series, the original stories have been developed into something completely different. Michael Dinner, the adaptor explains:

“I wanted to preserve the emotional core, while placing it firmly in my own world. I have two sons, 11 and 13. I adapted it for them. And I adapted it for my own father.”

“It is told through the eyes of a child—he is the hero of his own story. And it haunts me.”

Me too.

“The future ain’t what it used to be” Charlie tells his dad on their camping trip.

But for me, the text of the original story—even though it does date back to the fifties—remains the one to chill my soul.

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

First published in Fantasy & Science Fiction (December 1954), “The Father-Thing” is one of Philip K. Dick’s most effective and well-crafted short stories. It takes a common paranoid delusion (this thing that looks like father is not really father), develops it into into a convincing “body snatchers” premise, and then uses it to create an exciting tale of boyhood adventure. And yet . . . although everything eventually ends happily, the premise is so disturbing—and the sight of what is behind the “father-thing” so convincing—that the story persists in challenging our familial sense of reality and lingers in the memory.

It is one of Dick’s most frequently anthologized stories and—I understand—one of the episodes of the Dick TV anthology Electric Dreams, featuring Greg Kinnear as the father and the father-thing.

It is also my absolutely favorite Philip K. Dick story. And it still scares the hell out of me after all these years.

When the family—named (fortuitous coincidence!) the “Waltons”—is summoned to dinner, young Charles Walton informs his mother that there are “two fathers” quarreling with each other in the garage, and that the father who comes to dinner is “the other father.” Charles soon realizes that the world as he knows it is endangered by this “father-thing,” and he summons a misfit crew of three (a semi-bully with a b.b. gun, a quiet black boy good “at finding things,” and himself, to stop the “father-thing” before it can do real damage.

"I always had the impression,” Philip K. Dick once said in an interview, “when I was very small, that my father was two people, one good, one bad. The good father goes away and the bad father replaces him. I guess many kids have this feeling. What if it were so?”

In that interview he also tells us why children are important in this story, that when one has something to say and “one cannot communicate it to others,” that “fortunately, there are other kids to tell it to. Kids understand: they are wiser than adults -- hmmm, I almost said, ‘Wiser than humans.’"

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4* of five

The episode of Electric Dreams changes the plot little. Charlie sees his father get...inhabited?...by something that has to be alien. Charlie's mother isn't much of a factor in the story, and in the episode she's sort-of divorcing his dad...there's a teacher named "Mr. Dick" in the episode...I can't make the whole thing work in my head...what's the hell of knowing something that no one else knows if not not being able to say how and why you know it.

AKA "being a kid."

[Dennis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reasonably entertaining short story about an alien life form taking over the body of 8-year-old Charlie's father.

Charlie's mom does not believe him when he tells her about it and so he recruits a couple of boys from the neighborhood, and together they try to kill the father-thing.

I fail to see the deeper meaning that the book description here on Goodreads is trying to make out. It is a pretty short, relatively simple and slightly creepy story. It was entertaining enough, but really nothing remarkable.

This PKD short as well got turned into an Electric Dreams episode, which very much stays true to the source material. But it adds one pretty important thing by establishing a good father/son relationship before the transformation happens.
The addition of music and also of some more possessed people further enhances the experience.

Once again I liked the tv episode better. But neither one ranks amongst my favorites.



The PKD short story: 2.5/5
The Electric Dreams episode: 6/10

[[ J o ] · Rating 1 out of 5]

I.

I have no words. I just thought it was pretty shit.

Sorry Dick. Sorry world. Sorry science fiction. *shrug*

[Jayakrishnan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published one years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Decades before the Alien movies. PKD was a gift that kept giving. Anyway, nothing really wrong with this story in which a kid believes an entity ate his father and soon has to take the help of the neighborhood Italian tough guy and a black kid. This is more like a family invasion story rather than a town invasion one with a sort of an assisted patricide element. Anyway, I am not a big an of books featuring kids as the heroes. Early in the story, PKD refers to the 8 year old kids dilemma as one that would have confounded Hillel.

[Tristram Shandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

“‘[…] Hard day at the office – Friday, you know. Stuff piles up andwe have to get all the accounts out by five. Al McKinley claims the department could handle 20 per cent more stuff if we organized our lunch hours; staggered them so somebody was there all the time.’”

PKD’s short story The Father-Thing was published in December 1954, the same year that Jack Finney’s serialized novel The Body Snatchers came out, and one can say that there are quite a few similarities between those two. But then the 1950s were the heyday of paranoia, and whoever failed to see the potential Commie next door just did not look hard enough – for reasons they themselves probably knew best. The Body-Snatchers, when it was made into a film by Don Siegel two years later, often got a political reading even though the director claimed it was not intended, and one may be inclined to give such a reading to Dick’s story, too.

In fact, it is even scarier than The Body Snatchers because we are invited to share the perspective of a little boy, nine or eight years old, who knows that his father has been replaced by a strange being that looks, talks and acts like his father – at least, partly – but still is something else. Trouble is on its way when the Father-Thing smells a rat because of the boy’s evasive behaviour, and soon our little hero has to team up with the neighbourhood kids in order to get rid of the uncanny intruder.

Even though The Father-Thing is a very gripping story, probably appealing to one of our innate fears, namely that of becoming estranged from our family, the place where we are at home, where we grow from and which shapes us, and will stay in a reader’s mind as such, it is partly marred by the fact that the boy, Charles, soon finds evidence that his fears are based on fact when he sees the discarded body of his father – a thin and brittle outer shell, the inwards of his father having been consumed by the Thing – hid away in a vat in the garage. This detail, and further ones along that line, destroy the ambiguity, which made the story quite darkly eerie at the beginning. I would also say that, had there been no concrete evidence of a conspiracy, one could also have read this story as a tale of growing up, i.e. of a boy realizing that the original image he has of his father is starting to crumble and that he has been living in a carefree children’s world so far.

Still, the story may work on another level than simply being a good horror story: Just consider what the Father-Thing says about his job over dinner (cf. the initial quotation). It sounds harmless enough but we all know that in fiction, nothing is done without a purpose: If a character in a movie coughs more than once, there is a high chance that he or she will die from consumption – you know, that sort of thing. So, if Dick has the Father-Thing talk about increasing productivity at the office by re-scheduling people’s lunch breaks, by making them even more disposable (in as many senses of the word as you like), might this not also mean something? Just give it a think, and suddenly the idea of human beings being replaced by lookalike “things” controlled from outside seems to take on a different meaning, doesn’t it?

By the way, this story kept me so intrigued that I did some Internet research in order to find out if there really are people who claim that members of their family circle have been exchanged. This kind of thing in fact does exist and is called the Capgras syndrome. It’s quite interesting how reading PKD can make you discover lots of new things.

[Verba Non Res · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decía Philip Dick que, siendo muy chico, tenía la impresión de que su padre era en realidad dos personas: una buena y una mala. Sin necesidad de desempolvar a Freud, puede suponerse que este tipo de pensamientos son muy frecuentes en los niños. Para ellos los padres son la fuente de todo lo que les puede resultar deseable, pero también de cualquier posible restricción. Como el chico tampoco llega a entender los motivos de los adultos (es decir, cuando los adultos tienen motivos para hacer las cosas que hacen) la transición de sus padres de un extremo a otro, del cuidador al censor, le resultan también caprichosas e inexplicables. Por supuesto que cada padre es dos personas distintas, y esta es la primera lección que hay que aprender para lidiar con el resto de los seres humanos, que también contienen multitudes, al decir de Whitman. Solo que, a medida que crecemos, dominamos la abstracción, y llegamos a entender que dos cosas, o dos personas, pueden ser distintas sin dejar de ser la misma.

Según un procedimiento que es habitual en él, y en la fantasía literaria, Dick llevó esta fantasía a los términos concretos de un relato de ciencia ficción. La perspectiva del niño cobra literalidad: los padres son realmente dos, uno bueno y uno malo, en lo que es básicamente una prefiguración de todas y cada una de las historias que alguna vez escribió R.L. Stine. El lector del cuento puede volver a tomar esta literalidad y reconvertirla en alegoría. Quizás todo lo que ocurre es efectivamente una fantasía del niño, lo que le daría un carácter bastante terrible al cuento, considerando cómo termina. Las historias de Dick, al menos las mejores, suelen ubicarse en esta indeterminación. Sus personajes pasan algún tipo de frontera, y llegan a un punto en el que ya no es posible –ni para ellos ni para el lector- establecer qué realidad, o qué interpretación de la realidad, debería tener preeminencia sobre las restantes. En este punto, solo queda comprometerse con la interpretación propia y llevarla hasta sus últimas consecuencias.

“The Father Thing” es el cuento #6 de Electric Dreams
Anterior: “Sales Pitch”
Siguiente: “The Hood Maker”

[Yaaresse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cold War-era sci-fi short story from sci-fi legend Philip K. Dick. The synopsis here on GR is word-for-word from the introduction of this edition and gives a good idea of what the story represented when it was written (1954).

I read a lot of PKD when I was a kid and always enjoyed it. Interest in his work is trending now with the new "Electric Sheep" series on cable. That's not why I read this. I just hadn't read any classic sci-fi in a while, and this became available via the library. Today's readers might find the style simplistic compared to some of the overcomplicated more modern sci-fi, which is why it's important to read these classics from the 40s-60s with some background information about what was going on in society when they were written. Lots of sci-fi was influenced by the fears people had about world wars, the Cold War, McCarthyism, civil unrest during Vietnam, etc. I suspect the current rise in popularity of dystopian fiction and conspiracy-theory plots is driven by similar conscious or unconscious fears about current events. Art reflects life which reflects art: the cycle continues.

[Kirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant pulp sci-fi, blunt and visceral. I first read this story as a teenager. Just a few pages, it's a brief slab of lurid boyhood horror.

[Kaila · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read as part of a Philip K. Dick class I'm taking

Simple and chilling. I've seen both movie versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but something about doing it through the eyes of a child makes it 10 times worse.

"The other one," Charles was muttering under his breath. "The other one came in."

Wow okay no thank you!

[Amanda Benson · Rating 3 out of 5]

"A story about humans being replaced by replicated versions... It's as much about the invasion of a family as it is about the invasion of the community or the country or the world."

[Andy Coleman · Rating 2 out of 5]

A SIMPLE MAN'S REVIEW:

First off, this is a short story, I mean really short. The premise has been done a thousand times before, but it was done well enough for this quick read. I just wish I hadn't paid for it.

[Verba Non Res · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philip Dick said that, being very young, he had the impression that his father was really two people: a good one and a bad one. These types of thoughts are very common in children. For them, parents are the source of everything that may be desirable, but also of any possible restriction. Since the boy also fails to understand the motives of adults (that is, when adults have reasons for doing the things they do), his parents' transition from one extreme to the other, from caretaker to censor, is also capricious and inexplicable. . Of course, each parent is two different people, and this is the first lesson to be learned in order to deal with the rest of human beings, which also contain multitudes, according to Whitman. Only as we grow up, we master abstraction, and come to understand that two things, or two people, can be different without ceasing to be the same.

In a way typical of his literature, and of literary fantasy, Dick translated this fantasy into the concrete terms of a science fiction story. The child's perspective becomes literal: the fathers are really two, one good and one bad, in what is basically a prefiguration of each and every one of the stories that R.L. Stine wrote. If he wants to, the reader can take this literalness and reconvert it into an allegory. Perhaps everything that happens is actually a fantasy of the child, which would give the story a rather terrible tone, considering how it ends. Dick's stories, at least the best of them, tend to be located in this indeterminacy. His characters cross some kind of border, and reach a point where it is no longer possible – neither for them nor for the reader – to establish which reality, or which interpretation of reality, should have pre-eminence over the rest. At this point, the only option is to commit to one's own interpretation and take it to its ultimate consequences.

“The Father Thing” is Electric Dreams story #6
Previous: “Sales Pitch”
Next: “The Hood Maker”

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This classic PKD short-fic is domestic horror at its most intimate—Invasion of the Body Snatchers shrunk down into a backyard, rendered through the terrified eyes of a child. It’s one of those stories where the familiar becomes suddenly alien, where a father’s smile bends just slightly wrong, and that slight wrongness opens a bottomless pit.

What makes the story hit is the child’s perspective. Dick never mocks the fear; he honours it. Charlie senses the wrongness before adults do because children notice the glitch in the matrix—the tone, the gait, the emotional static that grown-ups ignore.

The Father-Thing is polite, functional, and perfectly imitative—and entirely hollow.

Dick weaponizes the uncanny. The replacement father is not monstrous; he’s off. And that subtle wrongness becomes terror.

Soon, the world begins to fill with replicas, and Charlie’s childhood dissolves under the weight of existential dread. The father figure, protector and anchor, becomes the threat.

PKD always excelled at the psychological slip—the moment when reality fractures like thin ice. This story delivers that fracture with simplicity and sharpness. The horror is not cosmic; it’s personal.

Not apocalyptic; intimate. It’s about the fear that the people you depend on are not who you think they are.

Kids save the day, and the ending offers a flicker of resistance—but never true comfort.

Dick wasn’t writing about aliens; he was writing about emotional disconnection, about the terror of seeing a loved one become unrecognizable.

One of the best sci-fi stories you’ll ever read. Most recommended. Give it a go.

[maya · Rating 2 out of 5]

ok like this is not a real book just a short story but honestly ive mainly just been reading horror short stories for class like we are deep in a reading slump it's bad. anyways i am still trying to track my reading yknow. so every story that we read in class that happens to be on gr i will log.

i don't really like this one it was really fast and kinda ick. like i get it's horror but this was like coraline ripoff speedrun except it came first and it's goopier. but also, kinda scary! especially because the conclusion is not really a conclusion it's just like k dad's dead and we killed the monsters off we go. i guess i could give this 3 stars I'm just not into icky scifi stuff like this

[James Harbour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Casually read this after looking at the intro for 'The Hood Maker' which we watched on Amazon the other day. Got caught up reading and finished before I realised.

It's very raw compared to a lot of his novels but it grips you in a very primal way. It's so relatable despite its unlikely prose and, above all, it speaks to the part of us that knows we are totally and completely replaceable. Sometimes a few people might notice, but most wouldn't. Have we all already been replaced? Would we even know?

[Jonathon Fenton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though this has been done, I believe PKD wrote his first. (The Body Snatchers was first published in Nov December of 1954. The Father-Thing was published in December of 1954, so its unclear if either influenced the other)
If "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is a Hollywood film, this is an episode of the Twilight Zone, or possibly an independent film. I like how PKD keeps it simple and focuses on the family. That makes if much more unsettling to me.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip K. Dick's "Father-Thing" is a peculiar yet thought-provoking narrative that delves into childhood fears. The story's eerie ambiance resonates with readers, evoking memories of the strange and scary tales that felt hauntingly real in youth. In a brief yet impactful exploration, Dick skillfully blurs the lines between reality and imagination, prompting readers to reflect on the peculiar narratives that once dominated their own childhood perceptions.

[Andy Hickman · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Father-Thing”: Truly creepy horror. The invasion of a family by a growing morphing alien .. something! ****
The replacement of a boy's father with a replicated version, only the son sees the difference and has to recruit other children to help him reveal the truth (similar to Enid Blyton's Famous Five stories .. but no further parallels than that!)

[Tsartomat Placeholder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dick is no stranger to some scary or spooky parts in his works, but this is the first time i see Dick writing a straight-up horror. And it is straight-up — no twists, no catches, no ironic jokes. Just kids against the body snatchers. Released just before The Body Snatchers.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good horror short story. I really like how both the son and the mom know dad is a monster, but they react so differently. When the son seeks help from his friends, I had "It" vibes. One of my fav Dick shorts.

[Micah Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting short story.

[Austin Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the same vein as Heinlein's Puppet Masters.

[Rosaleen Lynch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although Science Fiction, we can still ask questions like - 'What makes a man a monster?' and 'How does a Dad become unrecogniasable as a parent?'

[ℜ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles, Peretti, and Daniels: the terrific trio of 1954.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cute little suburban alien invasion story, that only kids can solve.

Quick, a bit of action, a bit of squirm, a bit of horror.

[Yosef Shapiro · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good but not great short story. It is an invasion of the body snatchers type of scenario.

[Stijn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super cool! A bit horror-like even. He always made strange and weird stuff, but this got the scary parameter a tuned up.

[Chris Hall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short and to the point, kind of goes as expected and doesn’t ever really turn around or surprise. A cute short tale of boyhood adventure, don’t go in expecting to be blown away and you’ll have fun.