A Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick

A shape moved clumsily, slowly along the porch. A bent shape which crept blindly, as if accustomed to the darkness within the Earth. It looked up at him with filmed-over grey eyes; he saw and understood the shirt of dust which clung to it... dust trickled silently down its bent body and drifted into the air. And it left a fine trail of dust as it moved.

It was badly decayed. Yellowed, wrinkled skin covered its brittle bones. Its cheeks were sunken and it had no teeth. The Form Destroyer hobbled forward, seeing him; as it hobbled it wheezed to itself and squeaked a few wretched words. Now its dry-skin hand groped for him and it rasped, 'Hey there, Tony. Hey there. How are you?'

Fourteen colonists receive new orders; they're being transferred to the previously uncolonized planet of Delmak-O. But when they arrive--on one-way transports--they find that there's no communication with the powers that sent them there. They've come from other worlds where they received specific instructions about their roles, but there are no instructions on Delmak-O. The world is populated by strange creatures that seem both mechanical and organic; some have the ability to replicate any object placed in front of them. Out there in the wilds there is a cubic building (which they call, imaginatively, The Building) which vanishes if you try to approach it. It's a setup designed to make people go mad, or perhaps for people who are already mad. Soon, they start dying one by one.

A Maze of Death is one of Dick's most overtly religious books. In the theology of the colonists, advanced alien beings have assumed the role of God, and those who are lucky often find themselves visited by their avatars: the Walker-on-the-Earth, the Mentufacturer, the Intercessor. This religion is vaguely Christian, tinged with paganism, often Gnostic: these avatars are opposed by the Form Destroyer, who is responsible for the imposition of entropy and death. A Maze of Death is the first book of Dick's I've read since finishing Lawrence Sutin's biography of him, and there are familiar echoes here of the religious visions whose meaning Dick clamored to discover in the last decade of his life. The colonists share a religion of universal certitude; some of them, like protagonist Seth Morley, have even seen avatars like the Walker, who saves him from boarding a doomed ship. Ironically, Delmak-O is more frightening to them because it resembles the world in which the rest of us live, where the existence of God, much less His intentions or directions for our lives, is obscure.

I wouldn't put A Maze of Death among Dick's best work, partly because of the--SPOILER ALERT--Life of Pi-esque twist at the end. As it turns out, Delmak-O is actually a constructed reality occupied by the residents of a spaceship, left unable to land anywhere because of an accident. These residents enter computer-generated scenarios like Delmak-O regularly to alleviate the tedium of their situation; but their increasing, and increasingly violent, resentment toward one another surfaces in the simulation. Everyone who dies on Delmak-O returns to the ship perfectly safe and alive. But what frightens them the most is the convincing nature of the computer-generated theology. What seemed so real, and so gratifying, is taken from them, and once again they occupy a life that hurtles toward death with no purpose.

Though A Maze of Death was written, as far as I know, before Dick's visions, the ending of A Maze of Death suggests the most frightening possibility that Dick considered: that there was no presence beaming ideas on rays of pink light into his brain, that it was all fake, and that he was mentally ill. All that is troubled, though, in the book's final moments, when the Walker--who as far as the ship residents know, was only a computer simulation--comes to take Seth away from the ship for good. In the end, the idea that there is no supernatural, no godhead, no revelation, is too intolerable to depict.