Paul Tremblay has made a career of pushing the horror genre – and the novel format – in strange and exciting new directions.
In his latest, Dreaming of dead but electric sheep, The author presents an amalgamation of genre elements that can best be described as psychological-dystopian-science-fiction horror. It’s a mouthful, but the narrative does it all in a way that defies categorization.
Julia Flang is a former semi-professional gamer who works two mediocre jobs that she dislikes and lives in a modest ranch house in a San Fernando Valley suburb with her retired uncle, whom she calls Uncle Fun. Julia loves movies and gaming, but has nothing else going on in her life, so when her estranged mother, the CFO of a large tech company, approaches her with a potential job offer – a “once in a lifetime thing” that pays well just to do the interview – she hesitantly agrees.
The task is relatively simple and perfect for anyone with gaming skills: use the phone’s built-in controller to transport a person from California to the East Coast who is stuck in a vegetative state. This requires her to learn how to control her body – walk, turn, sit, stand, use her arms – so that she can take it out of the facility where she is housed and into cars and planes and through crowded airports. Julia, a fan of the movies, decided to call the man Bernie after the movie weekend in bernese. When the work ethic starts to bother her, Julia realizes it’s too late and she has to do it. However, he is soon approached by people interested in derailing the whole thing, people who, like him, do not align with the group’s dubious interests and who are ready to “make money” off this new, somewhat inhumane technology.
As with every Tremblay novel, any summary barely scratches the surface. The novel’s chapters alternate between Julia and you (yes, you). Julia’s chapters are “normal” in the sense that they follow chronological order and contain basic descriptions of action, movement, and locations, and dialogue. The chapters in the second person are like fever dreams from a world of shadows; The frustrating experience of a man trapped inside his own body with no control over it, no idea what’s happening to him, and only a few fragmented memories of his life. Additionally, Tremblay uses a similarly fragmented style of storytelling (involving words and sentences stuck in boxes and/or “moving” on the page) to keep things interesting, but also confusing and scary.
This novel operates on many different levels and planes of existence? Bernie’s mind is filled with AI that controls his body, but his consciousness is still there and struggling to regain control, struggling to remember things. Her world is filled with monsters, leeches, mysterious rabbits and terrifying shadows, but the real terror comes from her lack of control, being moved around against her will and having no clue as to what will happen next. Bernie is the epitome of AI losing control, and when taken together with the commentary on creativity and AI and the meta interludes in which the author takes a wrecking ball on the fourth wall and addresses the readers, it is the best anti-generative AI story horror has ever seen.
Despite all the horror, this is a very funny novel. Julia is sarcastic and struggles to maintain her withdrawal, but the conversations she has and the messages she writes are always amusing. However, humor is far from the crown jewel here. This title belongs to Tremblay jugglers with lots of big ideas. The nature of life, death, and consciousness, the evils of the group, dehumanizing practices in the name of capitalism, and AI, and even what it means to be human are all explored here: “Is Bernie alive? Is he feeling pain? Is he experiencing everything through the bars of his body as a prisoner? Is his consciousness trapped in a spiritual keyhole? Where does consciousness begin or end?” There are no definitive answers here, but the way Tremblay weaves humanity, love, the importance of relationships, and humor throughout the narrative provides answers that don’t need to be told.
A genre-bender full of big ideas that constantly switches between a world full of real or uncomfortably plausible nightmares and a bizarre hellscape in which loss of self, memory and autonomy are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, dreaming of dead but electric sheep is a haunting and terrifyingly disorienting novel that invites readers to contemplate a future that has already begun. Tremblay has always been an innovator, but this beautifully written collection of bizarre stories, real and imagined, establishes him not only as one of the most original and exciting voices in the world of horror, but also as one of the smartest, most fascinating writers in contemporary fiction.
Gabino Iglesias is an author, book critic, and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find her on X, formerly Twitter, @Gabino_Iglesias.
