One of Dick's earlier works, The Cosmic Puppets is his only pure fantasy novel. Millgate, Virginia -- it should have been the sort of town where nothing ever changes! As Ted Barton is driving through Baltimore, on vacation with his wife, he is seized with an irresistible urge to head into the Appalachian Mountains and visit the town where he was born -- Millgate, Virginia. But when Barton finds his way into the little valley he grew up in, he is in for a deep shock. The town called Millgate is there all right: but it is a town he has never seen before. It is a town where Ted Barton had died of scarlet fever at the age of nine!