Ubik — by Philip K. Dick

This 1969 novel is one of four by Dick selected by the Library of America for its republication last month of the best of the master's work.

It's the only one of the four I hadn't read (full disclosure: I'd never even heard of it).

The other three, in case the suspense is killing you: "The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo award; "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" (1965); and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968).

Short (213 pages) novel shorter: "Ubik" is a fever dream, unbelievably wonderful with its startling language and sudden tangents and jaw-droppingly original and apt neologisms.
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Excerpts, describing some of the characters:

After he had dressed — in a sporty maroon wrapper, twinkle-toes turned-up shoes and a felt cap with a tassel....

Square and puffy, like an overweight brick, wearing his usual mohair poncho, apricot-colored felt hat, argyle ski socks and carpet slippers....

She wore an ersatz canvas workshirt and jeans, heavy boots caked with what appeared to authentic mud. Her tangle of shiny hair was tied back and knotted with a red bandanna. Her rolled-up sleeves showed tanned, competent arms. At her imitation leather belt she carried a knife, a field-telephone unit and an emergency pack of rations and water. On her bare, dark forearm he made out a tattoo. CAVEAT EMPTOR, it read. He wondered what that meant.

A young stringbean of a girl with glasses and straight lemon-yellow hair, wearing a cowboy hat, black lace mantilla and Bermuda shorts.

A good-looking, older, dark woman with tricky, deranged eyes who wore a silk sari and nylon obi and bobby socks.

A wooly-haired adolescent boy wrapped in a superior and cynical cloud of pride, this one, in a floral mumu and Spandex bloomers.

The mannish, thirtyish, sand-colored lady wearing ersatz vicuna trousers and a gray sweatshirt on which had been printed a now faded full-face portrait of Bertrand Lord Russell.

Over by the window G. G. Ashwood, wearing his customary natty birch-bark pantaloons, hemp-rope belt, peekaboo see-through top and train-engineer's tall hat, shrugged indifferently.

It arose from within a slender, earnest-looking individual who sat bolt-upright in his chair, his hands on his knees. He wore a polyester dirndl, his long hair in a snood, cowboy chaps with simulated silver stars. And sandals.

Beside it stood a beetle-like individual wearing a Continental outfit: tweed toga, loafers, crimson sash and a purple airplane-propeller beanie.
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Four for the road:

"We haven't gone anywhere. We're where we've always been. But for some reason — for one of several possible reasons — reality has receded; it's lost its underlying support and it's ebbed back to previous forms. Forms it took fifty-three years ago. It may regress further."

"Maybe, he thought, I've come to the end. He began to walk toward the abandoned drugstore, not taking his eyes from it; he watched it pulse, he watched it change between its two states, and then, as he got closer and closer to it, he discerned the nature of its alternate conditions.

"At the amplitude of greater stability it became a retail home-art outlet of his own time period, homeostatic in operation, a self-service enterprise selling ten thousand commodities for the modern conapt; he had patronized such highly functional computer-controlled pseudo merchants throughout his adult life.

"And, at the amplitude of insubstantiality, it resolved itself into a tiny, anachronistic drugstore with rococo ornamentation. In its meager window displays he saw hernia belts, rows of corrective eyeglasses, a mortar and pestle, jars of assorted tablets, a hand-printed sign reading LEECHES, huge glass-stoppered bottles that contained a Pandora's heritage of patent medicines and placebos...."