A Maze of Death
Ratings23
Average rating3.7
Put a bunch of people together under a weird pretext and it won't be long before they start killing each other. This book gets likened to Agatha Christie's 'And Then There Were None', but it's more than a murder mystery. PKD leads us down one blind alley after another, scattering a few bodies along the way, and all the while he's laughing at us for following the wrong clues.
Fourteen members of an interplanetary mission set up a base station and find themselves isolated. They come from disparate areas of life, almost as if PKD wanted to put one of each of several tropes together - the economist, the doctor, the psychologist, the scientist and his angry wife, the seductive blond, the youthful thug, just the normal bunch of circus clowns who would soon be at each other's throats.
But then he mixes in a weird religion made for space travel where prayers are sent by radio to planets with a god-consciousness. And strange things are found on this isolated planet that don't make sense, including a building that each person sees the identifying sign on the door as something different.
The danger increases, the bodies pile up, some people disappear, and as things get more and more frantic it looks like we can see what is lying underneath the whole thing. But then he pulls another PKD trick on us, and then another one, before we realise how well we've been hoodwinked.
Weirdest PKD I've read so far (which is good), no schizophrenia here, but endless paranoia(which is different), but with the most disappointing end (which is bad, therefore my first and only PKD not getting 5/5).
Review in Romanian here: https://recomandarisffh.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/a-maze-of-death-philip-k-dick/
I thoroughly enjoyed the winding twists and turns that this book took. It went by so quickly! I feel that there are multiple layers to peel back and digest which is impressive for such a short narrative.