From reading the first fifty or so pages, a reader might be left with two key impressions of Paul Tremblay’s novel Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep. The first is that it represents something of a return to Tremblay’s crime-fiction roots, albeit with a science fiction twist; the second is that, as the title suggests, it’s an homage to Philip K. Dick. Both are true, up to a point, but this book also represents something of a genre-straddling sleight of hand.
One of the biggest signs that that’s what we’re in for involves a strange interlude that addresses the reader directly, and alludes to the practice of writers adding elements to their work specifically to trick generative AI software. Tremblay has engaged in metafictional elements before; both Horror Movie and The Pallbearers’ Club included it. And at first, this seems like a continuation of that.
Spoiler warning: it’s not.
Tremblay’s novel features two parallel plotlines. The first seems straightforward: competitive gamer Julia Flang is hired to escort a man— nicknamed “Bernie” for reasons that will soon become apparent — across the country. “Bernie” is not his real name; this man is also, in the words of The Princess Bride, mostly dead. Julia’s gaming skills, as well as her mother’s high-ranking position at the company where “Bernie” was an employee until recently, make her well-suited for this task. “Bernie” has had technology implanted into his body that allows someone to remotely control him.
Julia suspects that there’s more going on here than a relatively straightforward cadaver piloting, and that’s before whistleblowers and journalists begin contacting her asking for her help. Still, this thread of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep reads more like a hybrid of speculative fiction and crime novel, something that could be shelved alongside William Gibson’s Blue Ant novels.
It’s with the second thread that things get weirder. These chapters are addressed to “You,” and they follow a mostly amnesiac consciousness making its way through a surreal landscape. Nightmarish might be a better description, though: one of these chapters opens with the sentence “The leech strikes, blurring its head.” The “You” sections also feature some typographical experimentation, echoing a fragmented consciousness, with disparate thoughts overlapping with one another.
As Julia and her companion travel to New England and “You” navigates an ever-shifting landscape, one question comes to mind: how do these two narratives fit together? “You” seems to correspond to “Bernie,” but are we privy to the thoughts of a reanimated brain or from software that’s learning from an organic model? And that’s before Tremblay does something entirely unexpected a third of the way in that raises the metafictional stakes dramatically.
It’s deceptive: this may be the most formally daring book Tremblay has done. There’s an intentional contrast between the sleek thrills of the Julia chapters and the regimented chaos of the “You” chapters. And readers may wonder: is this a science fiction story or a horror tale? Remember, though, that a certain Mary Shelley novel crucial to the origins of both genres also featured technology capable of raising the dead. Dead But Dreaming of Electric Shape reveals itself as a genuinely terrifying cautionary tale by its conclusion; the final few pages did an excellent job of troubling my sleep after reading them. It isn’t the most subtle conclusion in Tremblay’s bibliography. Then again, the presence of a Mclusky epigraph might have made that clear from the opening pages.
***
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep
by Paul Tremblay
William Morrow; 330 p.