I have read every single damn one, including the non sci-fi, realism novels, and they are all a mixture of wonderful yet flawed. The balance varies. Some are only slightly wonderful and very flawed (usually the ones he wrote on speed in a few hours because he was strapped for cash), while others are incredibly wonderful and only slightly flawed.
But the thing about PKD is, even the deeply flawed and mostly bad ones usually have at least something magical and memorable about them.
It's hard to pick one out of them all, but if I had to, I'd pick A Scanner Darkly.
Other notables: Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time Slip, We Can Build You, Flow My Tears The Policeman Said, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, and god knows what other ones I have forgotten.
Or you can just do what I did, and read them all...
I read the short story "The hanging stranger". It did have some nice elements indeed, but the descriptions were poor in my view (i only note this since i expected better descriptions from such a known author). I liked the core idea, the main image (hanging stranger), and also the bleakness of the concept. I did not like the dialogue.
The characters did seem quite empty..
I will look into more of the short stories though
