Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"Paul Tremblay is on fire. . . .As entertaining and pop-culture savvy as this novel can be, it's emotionally wrenching and truly scary."
--Ed Park, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed, Different Dreams and An Oral History of Atlantis

Philip K. Dick meets the Coen Brothers in this genre-bending near-future tech nightmare that is as bitingly funny as it is horrifically believable from the New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie.

Meet Julia Flang, a twenty-something former semi-professional gamer, living with her retired uncle, and working two jobs she doesn't like. Out of the blue, her estranged mother, a CFO for one of the world's largest tech companies, offers her a temp job with a payday Julia can't refuse. One sham interview later, she's offered the job: to chaperone a man in a vegetative state--one with proprietary AI implanted in his head--from California to the East Coast.

To sum up in Julia's own words: "You want me to remote control this dead dude across the country." In a word, yes. But he's not dead dead.

Meet a middle-aged man who wakes within a disorienting hellscape filled with monstrous grotesqueries. Worse than the fluid, morphing reality in which he's trapped, he has no memory of who he is. He certainly doesn't remember getting the rabbit tattoo on his arm. He only knows that he must find a certain person. Who? He can't remember.

Using a cell phone modeled after a video game controller, Julia fumblingly navigates the man she calls "Bernie" from the company campus and onto planes and through one of the largest airports in America. All the while, the man endures an ever-changing and worsening nightmare that offers clues as to who he was--and who he must track down. And as their two lives intertwine, Julia and Bernie become unlikely allies and fugitives on a collision course with reality.

Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep is a heady, horrific genre-bender from one of the most groundbreaking voices in fiction today.

"Creepy and unexpectedly humorous. . . .A master storyteller, Tremblay's b(l)ending of genres here truly is a perfect beach read."
-- NPR

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Tremblay (Horror Movie) throws down the gauntlet for AI horror with a novel that would make Philip K. Dick beam with pride. Short on cash, semi-pro gamer Julia is offered a job by her estranged mother, a Silicon Valley exec whose company is testing a groundbreaking technology. They have implanted AI bots in the body of a man in a vegetative state, and Julia agrees to chaperone him from California to his family in Rhode Island. The novel is told in alternating and overlapping narrations by Julia and "You," the voice of what is left of the man's body, whom Julia nicknames "Bernie." Julia contemplates the ethics of her task, while Bernie fights the "clicks" overwhelming him and struggles to remember who he was. Quirky textual choices in Bernie's chapters enhance the disorientation, unease, and heartbreakingly beautiful tone. Readers are quickly invested in Julia and Bernie as they "abide" across the country. This masterpiece of storytelling is injected with a squirming worm of fear that forces readers to take a critical look at AI's encroachment. VERDICT A not-to-miss experience for fans of a wide range of chilling, humorous, existentially terrifying titles, such as Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill, Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle, and Chuck Wendig's "Wanderers" duology.

Publishers Weekly Review

Tremblay (Another) impresses with this trippy sci-fi thriller. California burnout Julia Flagg's gaming skills could yield a big payday if she carries out a short assignment for Decillion, a "bleeding-edge monopolistic tech company." Julia's mother, the company's CFO, has offered her $50,000 to escort a comatose middle-aged man on a cross-country flight to a state where assisted suicide is legal. The man's muscles still work, thanks to nanotechnology that Decillion implanted in his brain, and Julia is tasked with surreptitiously operating the implants via remote control to maintain the illusion that her companion (whom she nicknames "Bernie") is still alive to airport staff and fellow travelers. As Julia comes to realize that Decillion's intentions are less benign than she was told, Tremblay takes the plot in wild directions, paralleling her experiences in the real world with vivid, symbolic nightmares that plague a character who may be Bernie. The narrative culminates with a chilling treatise on unchecked AI and corporate greed that deserves applause for its boldness. This is sure to satisfy the author's fans. Agent: Stephen Barbara, InkWell Management. (June)

Booklist Review

Julia knows it can't be right to pilot a nearly dead man across the country, but there's money, parental approval, and curiosity at stake. She uses her high tech gaming controller to manually guide the body's cross-country travels to his mother and a right-to-die state, controlling his body using rudimentary commands, getting him in and out of cars, walking through streets and airports, and maneuvering him to his seat on a plane. All the while, Julia can't help but wonder if "Bernie" is still in there and aware. Her mother's company assures her this isn't the case, but readers are treated to surreal chapters that weave aspects of Julia's journey with the struggles of a tortured amnesiac. The tenseness of Julia's perspective is tempered with humor, but the alternate viewpoint drowns in emotional horrors as upsetting as the shadow-infested landscape it can't escape. The very text of these chapters unsettles with clever, unexpected changes in format, voice, and style. Every aspect of the novel, no matter how initially incomprehensible, is a perfect thread woven into Tremblay's (Horror Movie, 2024) tale--even the title alludes to the central conflict. The dangers of emerging tech have never been so chilling and, simultaneously, so strangely delightful.

Kirkus Book Review

Horror writer Tremblay shifts gears for a provocative exercise in postmodern SF. Julia Flang is a young San Fernando Valley slacker unmotivated enough to do the Dude proud, and indeedThe Big Lebowski is her favorite movie. It's another old movie, though, that gives her the code name for the lucrative task her Big Tech mogul of an estranged mother assigns her:Weekend at Bernie's. Julia's Bernie is an employee who's fallen into a coma and, now "mostly dead," has been fitted with "proprietary technology" that can get him to a lab on the other side of the country; Julia, a pro-level video gamer, has just the joystick chops to steer him, zombielike, via remote control, through airports and down city streets. A shroud of secrecy and paranoia surrounds Bernie, and for good reason: A journalist who waylays Julia raises the prospect that while Bernie--who has a real name, as Julia learns--may prove an interesting case study in the workings of consciousness, it's also entirely possible that the corporation has more nefarious designs ("Is it a huge leap," our journalist asks, "to think weapons contractors wouldn't be dreaming about remote-control soldiers?"). Though Julia is given to falling back on bits of Coen brothers dialogue--"Lotta strands to keep in old Duder's head"--in times of stress, she's not without inner resources. Neither, it turns out, is Bernie, who, while not exactly having a mind of his own, "a robot wearing the permeable armor of failing human flesh," certainly proves a package that's hard to handle. It all makes for an entertaining shaggy dog, or maybe shaggy sheep, tale, though it won't come as a surprise that Tremblay ends it all on a nicely gory note. A smart and smart-alecky tale of technology put to bad ends by bad people.. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.