' AMONG THE CLICKS ' : BOOK REVIEW SNIPPET

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep By Paul Tremblay.

'' Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep, '' Paul Tremblay's 12th book is a difficult novel to review. On the surface, it's a straightforward science fiction setup :

Julia, an aimless 20 something gamer, is recruited by her semi-estranged mother, an executive for a massive-tech conglomerate called Decillion, for a very secret, very lucrative short-term job.

All she has to do is escort a man across the country and she'll receive a life-changing payout. 

The catch? The man whom Julia nicknames '' Bernie '' for imminently obvious reasons, is brain-dead, and his body is powered by experimental implanted A.I. technology.

Julia's role is to remote-control Bernie through the flow of commercial air travel undetected, serving as body-guard and driver as well as. proof-of-concept tester for Decellion's investors.

Julia feels morally queasy about the gig from the moment she learns what it entails.  

The larger implications of the technology are horrifying, but more immediately, she can't stop seeing the human being Bernie was, or is [even as she can't help pointing out the parallels to '' Weekend at Bernie's '' ].

Though he ostensibly consented to becoming a test subject while he was still in possession of his faculties, she can't shake the wrongness of it all.

And Bernie is, of course, not totally gone,  whatever the Decillion scientists say. In alternating, second-person chapters, the reader is immersed in a hallucinatory mental limbo populated by shadows, grotesqueries and '' the clicks,'' mysterious entities exerting an unsettling control over the landscape.

What remains of Bernie's consciousness linger here, mostly divorced from his memories and personality, but cogent enough to know that he's under someone else's control.

As Bernie's physical body is piloted through the real world, his mind undertakes a nightmarish fun house mirror version of the same journey.

To delve much farther into the plot would risk ruining the surprise and also, frankly, miss the point of the book.

!WOW! thanks Emily C. Hughes.