Joshua Glasgow’s Reviews > A Maze of Death > Status Update

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 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”.

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.

Every male character POV includes them creeping on the women. Oh, he’s tall. He has a firm handshake. She has well-rounded breasts. It’s disturbing. Also, I’m guessing there was a reason for it but when 2 different characters arrived separately, the scene of introductions repeated word-for-word. Weird. Last: Susan Smart says “they” call her Suzie Dumb. Wtf, are these scientists all 12 years old?

I’ve never read any Philip K. Dick, so I chose this for my latest audiobook. I’m already worried about whether it’s going to be a DNF for me in this format. It’s all weird sci-fi words which may be easier to follow from the page but less so when listening and driving. I’m not sure I understand anything that’s happened so far, except the main guy spoke to an AI chatbot that acts like Gandalf.