OK, I’m somewhere past the halfway point of Eye in the Sky, the Philip K. Dick audiobook I’ve been listening to. I said before that I felt Phil Dick was more of an “idea guy” than a prose stylist and that has only been reinforced by this book.

Yes, his writing became more sophisticated and careful later in his career, and I suspect these early novels of his were written in a quick rush of a week or two, just for the money. But still, the quality of the writing is very poor. Sentence after sentence follows precisely the same template.

“Flinching wildly, she set the glass down on the table…”

“Ducking suddenly, he turned to his wife and said…”

“Blinking incredulously, Hamilton tried to think of the right words…”

Almost very sentence starts with someone verbing something adverbially. Ugh. It becomes pretty distracting after a while.