They

For a book with a premise (and a cover!) as darkly chilling as this one's—a dystopian England in which art, and those who make it, are destroyed by roving mobs and vague official authorities—They is certainly full of light and beauty and friendship. Largely unnoticed when it came out in 1977 and largely forgotten since (before its recent reissue by the new McNally Editions), Dick's slim novel unfolds as a series of episodes in which the unnamed and ungendered narrator (to whom the title applies as it does to the anonymous mobs) visits artistic friends as they evade, with varying success, the encroaching threats. The writing is sharp and evocative; the mood is both heartening and horrifying.