At a glance
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.
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"Philip K. Dick would be honored to read Tremblay's novel, which, with its hypnotic prose, compels us to confront our existential horror even as it makes us laugh, excites us, moves us, and yes, makes us shudder a lot."
- Agustina Bazterrica, the international best-selling author of Tender Is the Flesh and The Unworthy
"Paul Tremblay is on fire, this time with a furious work of science fiction that, chapter by chapter, melts your brain and scours your soul. As entertaining and pop-culture savvy as the novel can be, it's emotionally wrenching and truly scary—you'll never think of the phrase proof of concept the same way again. Get ready to root for Julia Flang and weep for our lost humanity."
- Ed Park, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed, Different Dreams and An Oral History of Atlantis
"Innovative, terrifying, and deeply human. An electric and wild skewering of Silicon Valley's takeover of the human mind and body that could only be written by Paul Tremblay. Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep will keep you up at night."
- Sarah Rose Etter, author of Ripe and the Book of X
