Can you go home again? On vacation in Baltimore, Ted Barton has an impulse to visit the town where he was born: Millgate, Virginia. He and his wife Peg drive around country back roads until they find their way down to the town on the valley floor. But nothing is as it was when Ted was a child. The street names are wrong, the businesses are wrong, the buildings are wrong. He can’t find the house where he lived. When he goes looking for clues in back issues of the local newspaper, he finds an article from two years before his family moved away announcing the death of a boy from scarlet fever. That boy’s name was Ted Barton.

Peg is disinterested in Ted’s nostalgia trip. Ted takes her to a hotel out of town and then returns to Millgate and takes a room in a boarding house to figure out what’s going on. Things get weirder. Ghostly figures walk through the walls. None of the other tenants of the boarding house are particularly bothered by this. The landlady’s son Peter seems to know things. He takes Ted to a ledge that overlooks the valley and shows him who is really controlling Millgate, a vast godlike figure who can only be seen through Peter’s special magnifying glass. There’s not just one of them but two: one on each side of the valley in some sort of eternal standoff.

Peter is not the only one who knows. Young Mary Meade, the doctor’s daughter, also knows. She is aligned with the cosmic being representing sunshine and light while Peter is aligned with the being of darkness. They spy on each other using their particular talents. Mary can control moths and bees and talk to the Wanderers (the ghostly beings who walk through walls). Peter controls rats, spiders, and snakes. He can also make tiny golems out of clay and animate them.

It might be worth mentioning here that the godlike beings in this novel are actual deities of the Zoroastrian faith: Ormazd, the god of light, and Ahriman, the god of darkness. PKD was always interested in comparative religion.

Ted is understandably freaked out by these revelations and tries to leave town. He is thwarted by a lumber truck that dumped its load across the only road out of town. Peter tells him that he can’t leave. Millgate has other plans for him.

The Cosmic Puppets is urban fantasy, not science fiction, the only fantasy novel PKD ever wrote. It was the third novel he wrote (in 1953), fifth published (in 1957). It is not ranked very highly in Dick’s oeuvre but it is by no means a bad book. It’s the first PKD novel to deal with one of his favorite themes — reality: it ain’t what it used to be.

As always with Dick, his characters are grounded and real. But also as usual, Ted’s wife is kind of a shrill harpy. She’s annoyed with Ted from the get-go. Ted meets an old drunk named Will Christopher who remembers the town as it used to be. They join forces in an attempt to bring back the Millgate that once was.

The side of light has other allies besides moths and bees. Also cats, but they are not disciplined soldiers like the bees.

“Some cats may show up. But there’s absolutely no organization there. Whatever they feel like—no more. If they want to they’ll come. Otherwise we can’t force them. Only the bees can really be counted on.”

PKD clearly understands cats. 😼

While reading The Cosmic Puppets I was reminded of the 1998 movie Dark City starring Rufus Sewell and Jennifer Connelly. In the film, Sewell wakes up with amnesia in a hotel bathtub and finds a grisly murder scene in the bedroom. The mysterious Strangers ‘tune’ reality every night at midnight, changing peoples’ lives and identities from one day to the next. Something went wrong with Sewell. A glitch in the matrix, if you will. Dark City is a very phildickian movie even though it was not based on anything PKD wrote (see my PKD writer spotlight for more phildickian movies).

I was a bit worried about this book as it comes in dead last in a PKD novels ranked list. But even Dick’s worst novel is still pretty good. I don’t think I agree that it’s his worst either. I liked it better than Solar Lottery.