The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick

Format: eBook
Read: Sept 2026

Maybe I should have re-read A Scanner Darkly for my fifth Dick this year, but I wanted to try a new one, and I thought I’d be well primed for this, coming off Ubik and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. I picked The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch because I’d seen a few people say that this was their favourite and that it was particularly trippy. It is trippy; it is a mindfuck, but I’m not convinced that’s necessarily in a successful Literary way. For me at least.

I just didn’t have a good time reading this one. It’s only 240 pages, but it felt like a slog (and I guess it was; it took me 24 days!), and while I did finish it, I think I mentally checked out for the final third when I realised I had no idea what was real, nor did I really care any more – there were just too many loops around Elritch’s Chew-Z reality and too many false exits.

Since I didn’t enjoy it, I’m not motivated to spend time getting into a deeper analysis of it (I also am backed up with 4 book review post-holiday!), so this won’t be as in-depth as I’ve written up before, but I do still want to try to uncover what Dick was trying to get me to think about this time, and there are some interesting elements to this world.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) is set in the far-flung future of 2016. Earth is rapidly becoming too hot for humans to live on (ha! From 2026!). There are a couple of solutions to this. If you have the cash, you can undergo an ‘evolving’ process, but this is a risky procedure (you could devolve), which, if it goes well, results in you growing a hard, chitinous skin to help you cope with the heat. The other solution seems to be governments drafting citizens to go and live on colony worlds out in space, where they perform some vague manual labour and take a reality-altering communal drug called Can-D to escape from the misery of such a life on a barren planet.

While Can-D is technically illegal, everybody knows about it, and the UN don’t do anything to stop it. Leo Bulero illicitly controls the Can-D business out in the colonies, while on Earth he owns the company P. P. Layouts, which produces and sells the Perky Pat dollhouse ‘layouts’ and accessories that users inhabit while they’re high on Can-D. Palmer Eldritch is a well-known explorer who has just returned from some far-flung part of space with a mysterious new material that he is using to manufacture a new rival drug called Chew-Z. Chew-Z offers a much more powerful but individual experience, and threatens Leo’s business. Barney predicts that Leo will kill Palmer Eldritch, and so he sets out to do that.

Leo is dosed with Chew-Z, which pulls him into a reality controlled by Palmer Eldritch, and he realises how dangerous the drug is both to his own business and to humanity. There are several false exits in this sequence, and the reader can’t be sure that he ever really got back to the real world after this encounter.

Barney Mayerson is another classic Dick protagonist. He’s a talented precog with a good job at PP Layouts, but his personal life is a mess. He regrets his divorce from ex-wife, Emily (now happily married to a new husband); he’s living and sleeping with his new assistant, Roni (a classic Dick treacherous woman- is she just out for his job?), and he’s just been drafted for the colonies and is trying to get out of it by proving he is mentally unstable (he carries around Dr Smile, an electronic psychiatrist in a briefcase). In the end, he voluntarily goes to the colonies out of despair over his various personal failings.

On the journey, he meets an attractive young woman named Anne Hawthorn, who is also a volunteer, but her motives are as a religious missionary. She wants to persuade the colonists that God alone, and not Can-D is their salvation. In surprisingly short order after arriving at Chicken Pox Prospects, Anne decides God isn’t enough, gives up her mission and seeks out the drugs to escape from her miserable new life. She’s also another untrustworthy woman, as we learn from Leo that she is spying on Barney for him (surveillance being another common Dickian trope I’ve noticed). Barney, however, goes in the other direction. After experiencing Chew-Z, he begins to wonder if there might be a higher power.

This one has a similar melding of deep religious themes with a hyper-consumerist world to Ubik. Everything that drives the plot Three Stigmata is driven by the profit motives of Leo and Palmer Eldritch (at least in the beginning). Leo is afraid that Palmer’s new drug will saturate the market and kill his business, and that does appear to be Palmer’s plan. Here, capitalism is the means of control (means of escape from the overheating Earth) and offers the only escape from its miserable reality of colonist life where they must perform vague menial tasks in a wasteland (drugs).

Can-D is a ‘canned’ experience both literally, communally shared by others, and available to all others who take it. Perky Pat is a Barbie doll-like character that users inhabit when they take Can-D; you get the Pat avatar for the women and Walt Essex for the men; the default man and woman. Users can purchase accessories (home goods, cars, clothes, etc.) which they play within her packed plastic and very white American version of Earth. It is all very Malibu Barbie. As a literal ‘opium of the people’, Can-D is a religious experience for many colonists and has also delivered them through the doors of churches.

“I think you’d better find out before we get there. They’ll ask you and expect you to attend services.” She added, “It’s primarily the use of that drug—you know. Can-D. It’s brought about a lot of conversions to the established churches…although many of the colonists find in the drug itself a religious experience that’s adequate for them. I have relatives on Mars; they write me so I know. I’m going to the Fineburg Crescent; where are you going?”

While Chew-Z (‘choosey’) offers your own private, more intense and complete escape, you are on your own and must trust your own intuitions about reality. The other catch is that Palmer Eldritch seems to be in control and able to trap and manipulate you within it, and he definitely is a malevolent presence – a recurrence of those Gnostic themes from Ubik. For the characters that we join on Chew-Z (Leo and Barney), they don’t have a good time. They question whether Eldritch is God (not forgetting his stigmata – metal teeth, arm and eye – not at all unsettling), or simply some kind of powerful reality-manipulating alien that possessed the real Palmer? Chew-Z is, I think, a ‘body of Christ’ metaphor, and if all the colonists did imbibe it, it would have allowed Eldritch to eventually take over humanity. As it is Barney is just an absolute disaster as a human basically manages to defeat him with Depression (he could be transformed into anything, and he picks a stone)? Maybe? The end was – naturally – very confusing.

Other stray thoughts I haven’t been able to untangle:

• Another set of three – Barney has three very different women at different stages in his life:
  • His ex-wife Emily, the nice, very normal and authentic potter (like Molly in Flow My Tears!). He dumped her when they were about to start a family for the sake of his career. Now she has a nice life with a nice new husband who supports her career.
  • Roni Fugate, his smart and sexy new assistant and fellow precog. She’s ambitious, and after his job, their relationship happens because they both saw that it would; there doesn’t seem to be any true feeling between them. He spends all the time obsessing about Emily and barely has a second thought for Roni.
  • Anne Hawethorne, also young and sexy and yet a devoutly religious missionary, he meets at the colonies, and they almost instantly form a relationship. She is spying on him for Leo, but that seems to be of little consequence. She seems very unstable in a way that reminded me of Kathy from Flow My Tears.
• I’m definitely missing something significant in the pottery – unless PKD just had a thing for potters?!
• He does seem to have had a thing for “perky” Pats, having read Ubik, where a young female character, Patricia “Pat” O’Connell does get her tits out, and they are described as perky (memorable because this scene was bizarre).
• The evolving/devolving, I’m sure, has some thematic significance as well, beyond just being a cool/weird sci-fi thing as a response to global warming.

At some point I plan to read the VALIS trilogy, which I believe goes even harder on the religious stuff, and hopefully The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, so perhaps I can untangle this one better after I tackle that!

Even though I didn’t love the experience of reading it, and I got stumped on interpreting it, I still enjoyed trying to figure it out. I love the ambiguity in Dick’s writing; it has many layers, and its weirdness is open to many possible interpretations.

This was my final Dick of the year for Law of Fives! I have truly loved this little project; it was a fun intellectual exercise, and I definitely will read some more along with his biography and published journals. What a fascinating mind he had! The tightrope he walked between pulp and literary fiction, and the amount of big ideas he could pack into (literally) speedily written and such short novels is astonishing!

I’d rate the five I read:

1. Ubik
2. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
3. Dr Bloodmoney (it’s close between 2nd and 3rd… I actually might like this one a bit more for its extra dose of weirdness!)
4. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
5. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch