Five Great Novels is a collected omnibus edition of major Philip K. Dick novels. Although the filename references The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the text excerpt opens with A Scanner Darkly (1977), Dick's semi-autobiographical novel about drug addiction and surveillance in a near-future Orange County, California.
The excerpt begins with acknowledgments referencing Joseph E. Bogen's "The Other Side of the Brain" from the Bulletin of the Los Angeles Neurological Societies (July 1969) and Michael S. Gazzaniga's "The Split Brain in Man" from Scientific American (August 1967), reflecting the novel's engagement with neuroscience and divided consciousness. Poetry from Heinrich Heine and references to Goethe's Faust and Beethoven's Fidelio are also credited.
The opening scene introduces a man standing all day shaking bugs from his hair that a doctor insists do not exist, immediately establishing the novel's central themes of perceptual unreliability, drug-induced psychosis, and the dissolution of identity. A Scanner Darkly is widely regarded as one of Dick's finest achievements, drawing directly on his own experiences in the drug culture of 1970s Southern California.