Here’s a visit with a favorite author who hasn’t made a BookBin appearance since I reviewed his novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said back in 2009. Anyone who knows me knows that I love Philip K. Dick. While I haven’t read a lot of his works, I have always regarded the ones that I have read as top-shelf contributions to the science fiction genre. One of my ongoing frustrations with our local library (which for all intents and purposes, is quite lovely in almost every regard) is that the only one of Dick’s novels that they’ve had in a very long time is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Own it. Love it. Want something new.

So when I did a random database search on a whim and discovered that they were hiding one of Dick’s books somewhere other than the science fiction section, I could barely keep from running to the location. Seems that one of his earliest rejected manuscripts, penned sometime in the 1950s, finally made it into print in 2007. Surprisingly, Voices from the Street is not a science fiction book. It’s as grounded in present-day reality (for the time it was written) as anything could possibly be.

The story centers on Stuart Hadley, a young handsome lad with a pretty wife, a new baby boy, and a dull but promising job selling televisions. He’s also coddled, disaffected, and temperamental, with a constant sense that he was meant for more than the confines of his “normal” life. He wants to be an artiste, bohemian, spiritual, separate. He seeks fulfillment through various means and…well, in the end, it’s truly a Philip K. Dick novel, even without the electric sheep.

In this novel, Dick captures several personality layers through an array of complex and disparate characters…the damage of disconnectedness left by war, the ennui of privilege, the false witness of spirituality, the emptiness of having, the futility of wanting. His prose is dark, direct, never afraid to keep plummeting down the rabbit hole, never feeling the need to hold back on anything. His dialogue is vicious at times as his characters hold conversations reserved either for the closest of friends or the people one deems unworthy of censorship. Characters are blas