Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep

There is a job posting somewhere in this book that no sane person should answer, which is of course exactly why someone does. A Twitch streamer, good at making a controller feel like an extension of her own nervous system, gets hired to pilot a mostly-dead body across the country as a proof of concept. The pay is real. The body is mostly dead. You already know this ends in tears, or worse.

What it's about

Paul Tremblay takes a premise that sounds like a shock-value logline and treats it with unnerving seriousness. Our narrator is a gamer whose reflexes and audience make her the ideal candidate for a startup's grim little tech demo: remotely operating a human vessel on a coast-to-coast run, live, with sponsors watching. The setup nods to Philip K. Dick in the title and then goes somewhere queasier and more human. It is a road trip, a horror story and a satire of the attention economy stacked into one body that should not be moving. Tremblay keeps the focus tight on the person doing the driving rather than the machinery underneath, which is where the real dread lives.

Why everyone's talking about it

Tremblay is one of the few writers who can sit comfortably in both the horror aisle and the literary-fiction table and this is his most brazenly high-concept swing in a while. Readers who loved the slow-tightening dread of The Cabin at the End of the World or A Head Full of Ghosts will recognize his signature move: an outrageous idea, then a refusal to let anyone off easy. The Twitch-streamer framing means it also lands for people who think about labor, exploitation and what we agree to do for money and views. If you want tidy answers or a clean scare, this is not that book. Tremblay tends to leave the door open and the lights off. Squeamish readers and anyone who wants their science fiction optimistic should probably keep walking.

The verdict, for now

If your ideal Friday night is a story that makes you laugh once, then quietly refuse to sleep, this belongs at the top of the pile. It is early buzz territory, so grab it before someone options it and every group chat has an opinion. Just maybe do not read the last chapters right before a long drive.