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.