\n<\/p>\n
Paul Tremblay says his name into my recorder and confirms, for the record, that I have permission to use it. I had reached out wanting to talk about horror in general, and about the small crowd of adaptations circling his work, and somewhere in the scheduling a new novel appeared that I had not known about when I asked. The publisher had sent the audiobook, which landed too late for me to get through before we met, and I say so. Tremblay waves the whole thing off. Ask whatever you want, he tells me. There is no publicist steering the conversation and no list of talking points. We just start.<\/p>\n
The book is Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep<\/em>, out June 30 from William Morrow. Tremblay is careful not to oversell it and quicker to describe what frightened him while writing it. The premise involves a man declared to be in a vegetative state who has had proprietary AI implanted in his skull, and a young woman named Julia hired to move him across the country like freight. The tech keeps what is left of his brain talking to itself and lets a remote operator work his muscles. What happens to a person inside that arrangement is the part Tremblay cannot shake.<\/p>\n \u201cI definitely wanted it to be funny for a while, until it\u2019s not,\u201d he says. He means it as a description of the book and, I suspect, of his whole method. The horror, for him, sits with the man on the table. \u201cHis brain is being literally colonized by the AI that\u2019s implanted,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s the scariest it gets.\u201d<\/p>\n If you have read Tremblay, you already know he keeps returning to people who do not get a say in what is happening to them. He did not always know that about himself. Early on, writing short stories through the 2000s, a friend pointed out that he wrote about families constantly. \u201cI had no idea,\u201d he says, laughing at his past self. By the time A Head Full of Ghosts<\/em> arrived in 2015, followed by Disappearance at Devil\u2019s Rock<\/em> in 2016 and The Cabin at the End of the World<\/em> in 2018, the pattern had become a project. Three books, three families, three different ways of coming apart.<\/p>\n Some of it, he admits, was autobiography wearing a mask. When he wrote A Head Full of Ghosts<\/em>, his daughter was around the age of the possessed teenager at its center, a coincidence that has aged into something stranger now that his kids are in their early twenties and older than the character. \u201cSome of it just reflected my own anxieties about being an adult in charge of people who are children, and how strange that is,\u201d he says. The rest was him circling the possession story America thinks it knows, the one with the priest and the girl, and trying to expose how odd and how misogynistic the familiar version is. His aim, he says, was to \u201ctake the tropes that were familiar but make them seem strange again.\u201d<\/p>\n That instinct to look hard at a machine everyone else accepts is the reason his new novel exists, and the reason he has spent the last few years as a plaintiff. In 2023, Tremblay became a lead name in Tremblay v. OpenAI<\/em>, the copyright suit filed in California by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm and the lawyer and programmer Matthew Butterick, alongside authors including Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey. One afternoon inside that case walked straight into the book. He describes a mediation on a high floor of an expensive Manhattan tower, and the thought that arrived while he sat there. \u201cThere were rooms like this all over America, where the rich and powerful are making decisions, usually just off the cuff, willy-nilly, and millions of people don\u2019t have a say.\u201d<\/p>\n He is funnier about it than that makes him sound. When he brings up Sam Altman musing in public that intelligence will one day be a utility you buy like water, Tremblay does a small double take at the memory. \u201cI\u2019m like, cool, fuck off, dude. What do you mean?\u201d<\/p>\n He also went looking for actual science, which is where a certain gallows comfort crept in. One of the books he read while writing was neuroscientist Christof Koch\u2019s The Feeling of Life Itself<\/em>, an argument that consciousness requires directly experiencing the world, feeling pain with no filter between you and it, and that a computer by its nature cannot. Tremblay could not follow all of the math and cheerfully assumes MIT checked it. What stuck was the conclusion. \u201cAI is going to fuck things up, and it could destroy the world,\u201d he says, \u201cbut at least they\u2019re not conscious. I find comfort in that, weirdly.\u201d<\/p>\n None of this makes him a doomer, and he is wary of his own algorithm feeding him the news he wants. He would rather talk about the exits than the apocalypse. He points to the recent moment when enough Instagram users pushed back on a default setting that scraped their photos, and Meta reversed course. His hope for the book is that it lands as a nudge rather than a lecture. He does not want to be didactic, he says, right before saying the most didactic and most correct thing in our two hours.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not that hard to say no,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s going to take writers and readers and moviegoers and musicians and music fans to say no. We have to. No one else is going to do it for us.\u201d<\/p>\n Saying no is a loaded subject for a novelist who has watched his own stories leave his hands. In 2023, M. Night Shyamalan adapted The Cabin at the End of the World<\/em> into Knock at the Cabin<\/em>, and softened its ending considerably. Tremblay\u2019s verdict has the efficiency of a man who has delivered it before. \u201cI like the movie. I hate the ending.\u201d He is more baffled than bitter about the marketing around it, recalling that the studio spent the months before release seeming to downplay that the film was an adaptation at all. \u201cIt made no sense to me,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The mood is different this time, and the contrast clearly matters to him. A Head Full of Ghosts<\/em> is now in post-production under directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, with a cast reported to include David Harbour, Rebecca Hall and Esm\u00e9 Creed-Miles. Filming wrapped this past spring. Tremblay and his wife were flown to Ireland to spend a week on set, and the difference in how he was treated has stayed with him. The filmmakers asked for his opinions. They kept the book\u2019s title. \u201cIt\u2019s been a dream, frankly,\u201d he says. \u201cIt took a long time to get there.\u201d He thinks it is going to be genuinely scary, and he says so with the slight caution of a man who knows better than to promise an ending he has not seen cut. It is targeted for next year.<\/p>\n He is not naive about why the doors are open. Horror is booming, with published titles climbing something like 25 percent a year for three years running, a number healthy enough to make his worst-case brain mutter the word \u201cbubble.\u201d The exciting part, he says, is who is coming through: \u201cso many own voices, queer voices, people of color\u201d writing the genre instead of being written about in it. The part he dreads is the opportunists. He worries about \u201ccynical filmmakers, cynical producers, cynical publishers who don\u2019t like horror, don\u2019t care about it, and just want to jump on the bandwagon\u201d and flood the shelves with inferior work before the moment passes. As for why audiences showed up in the first place, his read is unfussy. \u201cPeople want original stories. They\u2019re sick of the superheroes.\u201d<\/p>\n Somewhere in the second hour it becomes clear that the interview I planned and the novel I had not yet had time to hear are the same subject. Tremblay has spent a career writing about people stripped of authorship over their own lives, the parent improvising control, the family under siege, and now a man whose consciousness is being overwritten from a laptop somewhere. Then he sued the company he thinks is trying to do a version of that to everyone, and turned the experience into a novel he calls, without flinching, an anti-AI screed. The horror and the life have stopped being separate departments.<\/p>\n When we wrap, he is relaxed about the whole thing, telling me to write about whatever I want rather than steering me back toward the book. It is the least anxious a person has ever been about not having a say. Maybe that is the trick he keeps trying to teach his characters and cannot quite give them. You can refuse. It is available. \u201cIt\u2019s not that hard to say no,\u201d he told me, and he has the paperwork to prove he means it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Paul Tremblay says his name into my recorder and confirms, for the record, that I have permission to use it. I had reached out wanting to talk about horror in general, and about the small crowd of adaptations circling his work, and somewhere in the scheduling a new novel appeared that I had not known […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35913,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11617],"tags":[25697,25698,13472,25699,25700,25701,25702,25703,25704,24493,20715,25705,20349,25706,25707,1339,25708,25709,25710,25711,25714,25712,25713],"class_list":["post-35912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-horror-global-news","tag-a-head-full-of-ghosts","tag-ai-horror","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-author-interview","tag-dead-but-dreaming-of-electric-sheep","tag-horror-author-interview","tag-horror-books","tag-horror-fiction","tag-horror-literature","tag-horror-movies","tag-horror-news","tag-horror-novels","tag-ihorror","tag-knock-at-the-cabin","tag-openai-lawsuit","tag-paul","tag-paul-tremblay","tag-psychological-horror","tag-severin-fiala","tag-the-cabin-at-the-end-of-the-world","tag-tremblay","tag-veronika-franz","tag-william-morrow"],"rttpg_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",0,0,false],"landscape":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",0,0,false],"portraits":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",0,0,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",150,150,false],"medium":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",300,300,false],"large":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",1024,1024,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",1536,1536,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",2048,2048,false],"post-thumbnail":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",370,265,false],"kava-thumb-s":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",150,85,false],"kava-thumb-s-2":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",230,230,false],"kava-thumb-m":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",400,400,false],"kava-thumb-m-vertical":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",370,500,false],"kava-thumb-m-2":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",570,450,false],"kava-thumb-l":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",1170,650,false],"kava-thumb-xl":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",1920,1080,false],"kava-thumb-masonry":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",600,999,false],"kava-thumb-justify":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",640,640,false],"kava-thumb-justify-2":["https:\/\/ihorror.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/paul-trembley.jpg",1280,640,false]},"rttpg_author":{"display_name":"#RiseCelestialStudios","author_link":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/author\/ralph-c\/"},"rttpg_comment":0,"rttpg_category":"HORROR GLOBAL NEWS<\/a>","rttpg_excerpt":"Paul Tremblay says his name into my recorder and confirms, for the record, that I have permission to use it. I had reached out wanting to talk about horror in general, and about the small crowd of adaptations circling his work, and somewhere in the scheduling a new novel appeared that I had not known…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35912"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35914,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35912\/revisions\/35914"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Family Man Who Didn\u2019t Notice<\/h2>\n
A Room on the Fiftieth Floor<\/h2>\n
The Ending He Didn\u2019t Get to Keep<\/h2>\n
What He Keeps Trying to Teach<\/h2>\n