CLIFFORD D. SIMAK – Out of Their Minds. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1970. Berkley, paperback; 1st printing, September 1970. Daw #514, paperback; January 1983.

   It is not clear at first where this book is taking place. All we know of the small backwoods town where our protagonist hero Horton Smith is heading is its name, the quietly evocative Pilot Knob. Later on, though, when Horton and his newly obtained female companion, a comely schoolteacher named Kathy Adams, find themselves on the run in turn to her hometown of Gettysburg PA, it is revealed that Chicago is not far off their route.

   So what this does is to place Pilot Knob in author Clifford Simak’s favorite story setting of either Wisconsin or Minnesota. It would be an ideal place for Horton Smith to settle in for a while, except for a couple of things: after making a wrong turn somewhere along the way, he sees a dinosaur, but only briefly before it disappears again. Tired eyes, he’s thinks. But then, after spending the night in a rundown farmhouse with a very strange couple, Norton wakes up in the morning in a cave full of rattlesnakes.

   The purely bucolic setting — again one of Simak’s specialties, and it is no different here — belies the fact that something strange is going on. After Horton realizes the couple he stayed with were actually Snuffy Smith and his wife Lowizey, he is reluctantly but totally convinced of that. (Today’s younger readers will need to be told that the couple were for many years the main characters in the “Barney Google” comic strip in every Sunday’s newspapers.)

   I’ve called this a science fiction review, and for the most part it is. Simak does his best to convince the reader that there is a scientific explanation for what goes on in the second half of the book, which turns out to be a collision between our world and the one created by the collective imagination of the people who live in ours: one in which Walt Disney characters and Don Quixote co-exist, a furious reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg is fought, as currently imagined, and where even the Devil himself eventually shows up.

   Since there are no rules in the world of fantastic literature, anything can happen, and does. Unfortunately, to my way of thinking, with only shaky logic behind the events that happen to Horton in this secondary world, I’m sure it’s not as fun to read as the author intended. Personally I found Simak’s description of life and the people in Horton Smith’s small backwoods hometown in the first half of the book a lot more interesting, even though that’s not the story he really had in mind to tell.