New York Times bestselling horror author Paul Tremblay — whose 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into M. Night Shyamalan‘s Knock at the Cabin — has announced his next book.
Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep will be published on June 30, 2026 via William Morrow.
Philip K. Dick meets the Coen Brothers in the heady, genre-bending near-future tech nightmare that is as bitingly funny as it is horrifically believable.
The story follows Julia Flang, a 20-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.
You can read the first excerpt from Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep over at Variety.
An adaptation of Tremblay’s 2015 novel, A Head Full of Ghosts, is in the works from filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (The Lodge, Goodnight Mommy).
Tremblay’s other works include 2016’s Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, 2020’s Survivor Song, 2022’s The Pallbearers Club, and 2024’s Horror Movie — which includes a shout-out to Bloody Disgusting.
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