Sometimes you read books and know that they’ll never hit you the same way again once you’ve figured out how it ends, but with Ubik, I think reading it again after knowing what happens would only make it better. Is it masochistic to love books that make me feel like I’m the crazy one? At no point during the story did I feel like I could rely on the narrator or trust the characters’ perception of what was happening to them. The whole time I felt like I had an inkling of what was happening but now that I’ve finished, I still question what actually happened. This truly was anxiety inducing and portrayed the dread of impending doom and lurking, looming death so palpably. It immerses you into a world where you question reality while searching for hidden meanings and messages with paranoid fervor. And it’s really amazing that you have all of this in such a small package and tied up in less than 200 pages!

Spoiler

The ending gave me the same unsettling feeling that I felt when I first watched the ending of Shutter Island, or when I read that now infamous glitch-in-the-matrix Lamp story on Reddit. I enjoy sleep so I’m just reconciling with the fact that I don’t know what happened at the end or what to believe (in a happier sunshine world, folks in half-life could just conjure beachfront villas in which to be splendidly lazy and forget places like Des Moines exist.)