I was scrolling through my phone last week, doom-reading another article about how AI is coming for all our jobs, our art, our souls. And I stopped. I thought about Paul Tremblay’s new novel, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, which I had just finished. The article was saying the same things the book says, but the book made me feel it in my bones. How did a horror novel get closer to the truth than a thousand think pieces? What can a story do that a warning cannot?
The Controller, the Comatose Man, and the Road Trip from Hell
Meet Julia Flang. She is a twenty-something former semi-pro gamer, living with her retired uncle, working two jobs she hates. She is broke and a little lost. Then her estranged mother, a CFO for a massive tech company, calls. She offers Julia a temp job with a payday she cannot refuse. One fake interview later, Julia is hired to chaperone a man in a vegetative state across the country. The catch? The man has proprietary AI implanted in his head, and Julia will remote control his body using a cell phone designed like a video game controller.
Julia nicknames him “Bernie,” after the corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s. The dark humor is intentional. She is funny and sarcastic, a Big Lebowski fan who uses movie references to make sense of the absurdity around her. But beneath the jokes, she is wrestling with a question that grows louder every mile: is Bernie’s mind truly gone, or is he trapped in there, screaming, while she puppets his body home to Rhode Island?
The chapters flip between Julia’s third-person perspective and a second-person “You” narration from inside Bernie’s head. His reality is a disorienting hellscape of morphing monsters and fragmented memories. He does not know who he is. He just knows he has to find someone. And slowly, painfully, he begins to remember. The two narratives overlap and contradict each other, creating a feeling of vertigo that mirrors the novel’s central anxiety. You want to trust Julia. You want to root for her. But the “You” chapters keep whispering: you are complicit in this, too.
The Click That Erases Us
The core theme here is not really about AI itself. It is about what we are willing to trade for convenience and profit. The novel’s key imagery is the “click.” Inside Bernie’s head, the AI is a constant, maddening clicking sound, a mechanical gnawing that threatens to erase whatever is left of his human consciousness. It is a perfect metaphor for how technology slowly, politely, consumes our attention and our selves.
Tremblay does something smart with the “You” chapters. He uses textual tricks, weird formatting and broken sentences, to make the reader feel the AI’s disruption of thought. It is disorienting on purpose. You are not just reading about a man losing his mind. You are losing it with him. This is where the horror lives. Not in monsters under the bed. In the slow realization that the line between helper and parasite has already been crossed.
The novel’s satire is biting but never smug. The tech company is not a cartoon villain. It is a corporation doing what corporations do: optimizing, extracting, monetizing. Julia’s mother is not evil. She is a woman who traded her daughter for a career. The book forces you to see yourself in that equation. How many times have you clicked “accept” without reading? How many times have you let an algorithm decide what you see, think, or feel? The novel’s central question is not “will AI destroy us?” It is “are we already destroying ourselves, and just using AI as the excuse?”
The Friendship That Shouldn’t Work
I finished this book on a Tuesday night. I sat on my couch, the lights off, and just stared at the wall for a long time. The ending hit me like a freight train. I will not spoil it. But I will say this: it is not the ending I expected. It is more heartbreaking, and more hopeful, than I thought Tremblay had in him.
The novel’s greatest trick is making you fall in love with two characters who can never truly meet. Julia and Bernie become friends, in their own strange way. She talks to him. She plays music for him. She treats him like a person, even when the company insists he is just a vessel. And inside his nightmare, Bernie feels her. He hears her. He fights to remember who he is, partly because she believes he is still there.
Core insight: the real horror of our age is not that we will be replaced by machines. It is that we have already started treating each other like machines. And the only antidote, the only rebellion left, is to look at another person and say, “I see you. You are not a product. You are not data. You are someone I will fight for.”
The book is not perfect. Julia’s voice sometimes feels a little too clever, a little too aware of its own references. But that is a minor complaint against a novel that dares to be both a satire and a love story, a nightmare and a prayer. Tremblay has written the definitive AI horror novel for this moment. It is terrifying. It is funny. It is sad. And it ends with a question that will follow you long after you close the book: who is controlling whose dream?
