What Is The Cosmic Puppets By PK Dick About?

The plot line is a man decides on a whim to visit his childhood home.  It's a small nowhere town in the mountains of Virginia.  The novel takes place in about 1953.  Only when the man arrives, his old town is completely different from what he remembers.  So much so that he asks to see the local newspaper archives for the day of his birth and the week when his family moved away.

His birth is in there all right, but his parents names are changed.  And the week he moved away, the paper says that he actually died of scarlet fever as a 9 year old child.

Severely spooked by these findings the protagonist decides to stick around, try to figure out if his memories are all false, was he somehow given a fake identity? BUT, we soon find that many much stranger things are happening in this particular hill-billy town.

Not quite Deliverance, but still pretty creepy. An old fashioned battle of Good vs. Evil, by the end.