Deus Irai by Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny

Deus Irae by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A painter’s quest for a failed God - an irate God - in a post-apocalytic Earth ‘peopled’ by mutants – Incs (incompletes viz., phocomelics), Lizards (Sun-worshippers)

Two young males, tall and thin and horny blue-grey like ashes. The one who had spoken raised his hand in greeting. Six of seven fingers – and extra joints. They were nearly eight feet tall. No flesh – bones and hard angles and large, curious eyes, heavily lidded. There undoubtedly were internal changes, radically different metabolism and cell structure, ability to utilize hot salts, altered digestive system.

Bugs (who worshipped the VW Beetle)

…them and their multifaceted eyes, their gleaming shells – a weird conglomeration of unhuman parts. And to think that they bred their way out of mammals, he thought, and in such a few short years. Speeded up frantically by the radiation. We’re related to them and they stink. They offend the world. And surely they offend God.

Runners and other oddities and chimeras

The creatures were not over four feet high. Fat and round, covered with thick pelts … beady eyes, quivering noses – and great kangaroo legs.
Amazing, these swift evolutionary entelechies, cast forth from what they were essentially poisons. So many and so fast; so many immediate kinds. Nature, striving to overcome the filth of the war: the toxins.

Some mutants were mere teratomas

and some have a single eye in the centre of their head. Cyclopism, I believe it’s called. And with others, when they are born, their hide is cracked and dried and sprouting a heavy coat of dark, coarse fur that covers the baby. And then there was one where its fingers came out of its chest; it had no arms, just like you. And no legs. Just the fingers protruding from the ribcage. It lived almost a year, I understand.

And in addition I saw one time a human ostrich - that is, long spindly legs, a feathered body, then naked up to…

Let me tell you the best I’ve ever seen, in all the places I’ve ever been. It consists of an external brain which is carried in a bucket or jar, still functioning, with a dense Saran Wrap to protect it from the atmosphere and to keep the blood from draining off. And the owner had to constantly watch it, to see if it hadn’t been dealt a traumatic jolt. That one lived indefinitely, but his whole life was spent in …

PKD’s usual tropes are there – paranoia, hallucinations, religion, the German language (even an allusion to Beethoven’s IXth Symphony, the dichotomy of good and evil.

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