"The Father-Thing" (1954)

Horror folks and weirdniks want badly to claim Philip K. Dick, and this story is one of their primary items of evidence. Personally, I think "The Hanging Stranger" is his great horror story. But Dick always seems to me a certain epitome of science fiction, even when his stuff is making me nervous, so I'm generally not that interested in the categorizing conversation. Case in point, I found this story in an intriguing anthology published in 2000, My Favorite Horror Story, edited by Mike Baker and Martin H. Greenberg. The premise (which really should be repeated every 10 or 15 years) involves asking contemporary horror writers to pick a favorite short story. The result features a bunch of same-olds but that's OK with me—they're all pretty good or better. This story was the choice of Ed Gorman, who I don't know well. In his introduction, Gorman explicitly denies the obvious connection with Jack Finney's Body Snatchers, the novel that provided the basis for the movie(s) Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But "The Father-Thing" does have a lot of elements in common with the movies and they are likely in Finney's novel too. The novel was serialized the same year "The Father-Thing" was published but I'm taking it more as one of those "in the air" things, which happen. There are more or less aliens from outer space in both, replicating humans evidently, purpose unclear. In the Dick story they might be from another dimension, or they could even be some exotic terrestrial insect, which would put it more squarely in the realm of the weird. Anyway, the story has been so oversold by Gorman and others that perhaps inevitably it disappoints a little. It's a simulacrum story at its core, division of remote-controlled doll. Dick keys it sharply on parents and what they are to children, a mix of gods and monsters, telling it from the point of view of an 8-year-old who believes he has witnessed something that means his father is not what he appears to be. Dick shifts the pronouns for Dad to it/its, a simple way to keep readers nervous, even as we attempt to discount the 8-year-old's ideas. A creepy centipede is featured in the last third, which seems to be an attempt to push it more into the rational and assert its fantastical reality with explanation, but in effect it siphons away energy. To me the critical point is that something so profoundly familiar might actually be something profoundly strange—not a bit comforting if you are 8, and a hard idea to shake once it's in your head. Ray Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven!" version from 1948 altogether made a better job of that, approaching it from a slightly different direction. But I'm not going to argue with the enthusiasm of Gorman and others. "The Father-Thing" is definitely worth a look—another nice point is that Dick makes a Black kid one of the heroes of the story without making a big deal of it. But hey, don't miss "The Hanging Stranger" while you're at it.

My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin B. Greenberg (out of print)
The Philip K. Dick Reader
Read story online.