Show me your skulls

 A while back a friend of mine gifted me a small book containing two of Philip K. Dick’s short stories, The Skull and Beyond the Door. I have read a couple of Dick’s novels and while I do not consider myself a particularly dedicated fan, I enjoyed them and I wrote a paper on one of them in college. 

 

The Skull is a story of a highly skilled felon in a dystopian future who goes back in time to kill a guy who founded a mysterious and inexcusably peace-oriented religion, with only the man’s skull for identification. You can see the twist coming from pretty early on in the story but it is still very entertaining getting there. I’m pretty sure Dick intended for the audience to be able to guess the twist because there is some Laying It On Real Thick in what then becomes the dramatic irony department.

 

Beyond the Door is an odd and charming little story about a cranky midcentury suburban man who buys his wife a cuckoo clock, which sounds nice, but it really isn’t, because the man isn’t very nice. The cuckoo clock can apparently tell that this guy is a jerk and never behaves properly around him. Things escalate in a claustrophobic midcentury suburban way until it all ends in hilarious wooden hand-carved Swiss tragedy. 

 

These were both good short, darkly humorous bathtub reads and I could certainly have read them a lot earlier.