"The Hanging Stranger" (1953)

Philip K. Dick can be made to fit too easily into the caricature of muzzy-headed acid casualty and/or mental illness case, which is why it's helpful to read a story like this one. He was young when he wrote it, not quite 25, but the images are powerful, mature, and hard to shake. It's written by someone who obviously knows what he is doing. After spending the day working on redoing the foundation of his house, Ed Loyce, an unpretentious model of the postwar working man, emerges to find a strange man lynched, his body swinging from a lamppost. It's a gruesome sight, but what's even more unusual is that none of his neighbors or friends finds anything strange about it. Loyce is wild to do something like call the police but no one seems to understand his reaction. Eventually someone does call the police—on Loyce—and the story deepens into stark paranoia. The power of this story is achieved in various ways. For example, the police do come and take Loyce away. We see Loyce chatting with them in the car. Suddenly he leaps from it in motion and runs away as fast as he can. Only then do we learn that Loyce knew immediately that the policemen were not who or what they said. It's a small enough town that Loyce can figure this out quickly. But we learn nothing of his suspicions until he has run away. It's much more chilling, confusing, and scary to be kept two steps behind the main character and primary point of view this way, a skillful choice by Dick. The story's plot goes much like a Twilight Zone episode—only a single isolated man can see the shift to insanity that no one else can—though it was never produced for film or TV until an episode of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams in 2017 (haven't seen it). Not everything works. The insect nature of the invaders is a mixed bag as is their portal way to us, and generally it can't quite shake the stink of the Cold War '50s. But calling up the simmering racism of mainstream America—the hanged man is not black, but it's a lynching—does much to overcome these problems and make the story feel fresh and relevant and if anything even more powerful all these 66 years later. The story has the same kind of conformity issues that show up in the original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and may have been the most terrifying element of it when it was first published. For me, it's the image of the hanged man swinging from the lamppost in the wind, made infinitely worse by the indifference of everyone. Whatever route you take to get there, this story is unsettling.

The Philip K. Dick Reader