Ubik
Dick, Philip K. Ubik. Doubleday & Company, 1969 (Book Club Ed.). Hardbound. Pareidolia—the tendency to identify human faces in everyday objects—is a form of what psychologists call apophenia, the very PDK-esque inclination to see connections between things those same psychologists insist are completely unrelated. This jacket design, credited mysteriously to 'Peter Rauch', so forcefully centers a fat-faced can of spray paint, it's easy to miss the human profile forming at the outer edge of the shocking pink cloud it's emitting. 'Ubik is a metaphor for God. . . .' observed Dick's former wife Tessa. 'The spray can is only a form that Ubik takes to make it easy for people to understand it and use it.' Each chapter heading is preceded by an ad for this transcendent product, one of many formal innovations Dick employs in this remarkable novel, which he also adapted to an unproduced screenplay in which, according to Tim Powers, 'the film itself appear[s] to undergo a series of reversions: to black-and-white, then to the awkward jerkiness of very early movies, then to a crookedly jammed frame which proceeds to blacken, bubble and melt away.'