Editorial Content for Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
When I first saw the title of this book, I was hoping that it was somehow tied to Philip K. Dick’s DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?, which inspired the film Blade Runner. How wrong I was!
Still, Paul Tremblay does pay a nice homage to writers like Dick as DEAD BUT DREAMING OF ELECTRIC SHEEP is a fine blend of science fiction and horror while flirting with literary fiction. This is a smart and darkly humorous novel with an edge and a protagonist who is easy to love. Tremblay already has gained quite a reputation as a writer of fiction bordering on the fringes of horror and the bizarre. THE CABIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD and THE PALLBEARERS CLUB are modern-day classics, and he continues to take on challenging new subject matters. This book may be his most absurd and strange yet.
"Several chapters are written from the perspective of what is going on inside Bernie’s consciousness. These are surreal and puzzling passages in which you cannot help but become engrossed, knowing that some secret is hidden there."
Julia Flang is a former semi-professional gamer and all-around slacker who idolizes The Dude character from the Coen Brothers movie The Big Lebowski. She lives with her Uncle Fun and has a love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with her mother, a powerful executive for one of the world’s largest tech companies. Julia’s mother offers her a short-term gig that will pay her more than she makes in a year. She reluctantly accepts, not knowing what her responsibilities will be.
It turns out that Julia has to transport the dead body of an anonymous man who has proprietary AI implanted in his head. She nicknames the corpse “Bernie” after the deceased character from the film Weekend at Bernie’s. The company employees, all of whom are quite creepy and freak Julia out, play on her love of video games by providing her with a cell phone modeled after a video game controller for Bernie. She is given a brief overview of how to manage him and is instructed to travel with him on a couple of different flights to eventually end up in Connecticut.
Several chapters are written from the perspective of what is going on inside Bernie’s consciousness. These are surreal and puzzling passages in which you cannot help but become engrossed, knowing that some secret is hidden there. Bernie has an actual identity that Julia will find out about before her wild journey is over. The chapters fly by, and you cannot help but continue reading to see how this insane buddy story is going to end. As Bernie begins to gain some level of free will after Julia's remote control breaks, the book really gets interesting.
Tremblay pulls out all the stops to make the unbelievable believable. He even plays with us in a very meta way by including a few short chapters with names like “A Brief Interlude,” where he speaks directly to us with random thoughts about what is going on in the novel. It gives us something to think about, which is precisely what DEAD BUT DREAMING OF ELECTRIC SHEEP intends to do.
Teaser
Julia Flang is a twenty-something former semi-professional gamer. Out of the blue, her estranged mother offers her a temp job with a payday she 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. A middle-aged man wakes within a disorienting hellscape filled with monstrous grotesqueries. He has no memory of who he is, but he knows that he must find a certain person. 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.
Promo
Julia Flang is a twenty-something former semi-professional gamer. Out of the blue, her estranged mother offers her a temp job with a payday she 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. A middle-aged man wakes within a disorienting hellscape filled with monstrous grotesqueries. He has no memory of who he is, but he knows that he must find a certain person. 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.
About the Book
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.
Audiobook available; read by Sophie Amoss, Graham Halstead, John Pirhalla and Dan Bittner
