Paul Tremblay’s ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’ is a genre-bending horror film: NPR

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.