Status Updates From Irrgarten des Todes

Can you DNF when you’re nearly 90% done? Because I’ve still got an hour left on this audiobook but I don’t care about anything happening in it. Naw, I’m kidding—I’ll finish it. But I’m not kidding about the not caring part. Idk if I’d feel differently if I’d read this from the page instead of audio in bits and pieces for a month. I suspect not, but hard to say. Unlikely to seek more PKD after this.

I’m not totally following what’s happening in this book. They’re suffering delusions and killing one another. There’s a gun involved, so ofc they’re killing each other with it. Why is this occurring again? Aliens who live on the planet they’re “researching”? Are they actually prisoners? Is this supposed to be “Hell” in some sci-fi-theological sense? Am I supposed to know these things?

“A chasm opened before her feet. She began to fall; below her the frozen landscape of the hell-world grew closer. Again she cried out, ‘Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna!’ But she still fell; she had almost reached the hell-world, and nothing meant to lift her up.”

Já começou bom

I’m getting kind of lost on where the characters are or how they got there. Or how many characters there are, in fact. I feel like more keep getting named who I’ve not heard mentioned before, even though it’s supposed to be a contained number of people killed off one by one. A bizarre affectation: there’s swearing in this book, but either PKD or the character(s) will only say “poop” instead of “shit”.

“What is this poop place?” -Ignatz Thugg

The book really leaned into the “Suzie Smart is a huge slut” storyline for a while there. Now it’s pushing forward the mystery aspect, with two people recently dead. I’m not really invested in that mystery yet. I am still wondering about the religious element, though: what is really going on? And who is “Specktowski”? I assume he will appear in the book in the flesh eventually, right?

The quasi-religious references to prayer and intercessors and deities is kind of intriguing, because what do these terms REALLY refer to? But mostly my feeling is that the characters are written very badly. They do seem like children play-acting at being adults. They’re stumbling toward a mystery, though, so maybe that’ll win me over. At the moment, my feeling about the book is unease.