The Pallbearers Club

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This is horror at its most heartfelt, horror that confirms our fears and flaws, the insecurities that we carry with us from our formative years.”— Priya Sharma, the award-winning author of Ormeshadow The Pallbearers Club constructs a maze of uncanny ambiguity and disquiet—a Nabokovian labyrinth that sustains its mystery past the point few writers but Paul Tremblay would risk.”— Ramsey Campbell BOND: High school, the kind of humor, the kind of music - you know, Art goes from - in this - on one of his many transformations from listening to Def Leppard and The Scorpions to being introduced to punk and getting really into Husker Du.

Let’s start with the plot and the way this story is told. The narrative structure of this book is so fantastic. It is framed as a memoir written by Art Barbara. Going in, we know nothing about Art, or why he would have written a memoir about himself. We also almost immediately notice that there are seemingly handwritten annotations and footnotes written by a mystery voice, and those footnotes are critiquing the story as written. We soon realize that this story Art is telling is about his friendship with mysterious cool girl Mercy Brown, whom he met through the Pallbearers Club, a group he formed in high school as a community service opportunity. Teens work at funerals of forgotten people to serve as mourners and pallbearers. Mercy saw the ad Art put out, and called him. Thus began a friendship built on punk music, 80s yearning, and a mutual interest in working funerals. Art for extracurricular brownie points, Mercy for… other reasons. As Art talks about their friendship, he slowly reveals that he believes her to be a vampire. Mercy, in the footnotes, is constantly questioning his words, editorializing, and it is through both of their POVs that we see a slow burn creepy story about toxic friendship and potential vampirism come to be. I loved how Tremblay decided to tell this story, as it makes both of our narrators have truths and lies that the are sprinkling in. And given that Tremblay is a master at creating deeply disturbing horror moments, the vampire stuff (as Art describes it) is well done, unique, and taps into an actual folktale from New England that is about, in fact, a woman named Mercy Brown who was thought to be a vampire. Look it up! Start HERE. I loved how he brought in this actual story of American mythology and connected it to a metaphor about toxic friendships. The vampire mythos that we get feels fresh and new, and it taps into the non-romanticized themes of vampires as users, superstitions around illness, and codependence. It’s so damn good. The "story" revolves around Art Barbara, a social outcast High Schooler who suffers from Scoliosis. if you want your copy to have spikes, you're gonna have to DIY—bookstores and libraries frown on that kinda thing.

a gangly, scoliosis-stooped loner, art was immediately drawn to the enigmatic and effortlessly cool mercy, who became his virgil into pot, punk music, and the wonders of providence, both its contemporary (for them) club scene and its eerie historical legends, like the one about mercy brown, a notable woman whose story is known to all of little rhody's babygoths.

It is such an outrageous and ingenious concept, I don’t believe anything like this has been done before and I love it for it’s boldness, the risks it takes and how it speaks so directly and fearlessly to the reader. So was her obsessive knowledge of a notorious bit of New England folklore that involved digging up the dead. And there were other strange things—terrifying things—that happened when she was around, usually at night. But she was his friend, so it was okay, right? BOND: And thinking about that, this book is very much located in the late '80s. It's a very Gen-X story, right? BOND: Right. Right. And along the way, Art comes to believe something about Mercy that Mercy disputes. Art believes she is a New England vampire. So what is a New England vampire? Where did this idea come from? Books can have teeth. A whole mouthful of them. The Pallbearers Club has a whole lifetime of them." — Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of My Heart Is a ChainsawSo not everything is autobiographical then? After The Pallbearers Club , something occurred to me. Could you still write a biography? Is anything left? There is an element of biography, then? The book opens with the narrator admitting that he is not who he claims to be. Is that because he is actually you? Melancholy and funny as well as dark and complex, this novel will be the dark hit of the summer. Unique in terms of style and format, The Pallbearers Club occupies a peculiar place between a thriller, a horror novel, and a narrative that will make you question everything." — Boston Globe through these comments, which alternate between teasing and confrontational, we get two very different perspectives of the central characters and their motives, and some insight into the dynamics of their relationship—a platonic m/f friendship whose central question is not the cheeky "will they or won't they?" but the ominous "is she or isn't she?," and the dark suspicions art has been nursing for years about mercy and her effect on his life (and her furniture) shifts the narrative into spooky, uncanny territory.

TREMBLAY: So first, like, '80s nostalgia's been sort of peddled for so long, you know, with - obviously, with "Stranger Things" probably being the most obvious. Seamlessly blurring the lines between fiction and memory, the supernatural and the mundane, The Pallbearers’ Club is an immersive, suspenseful portrait of an unforgettable and unsettling friendship.Neither of them can be belived-or can they?-as they identify the names are pseudonyms, chosen for their relation to the punk music scene of the 1980’s and the myth/legend of the New England Vampire, also named Mercy Brown. So they identify themselves as unreliable narrators even as narrate the relative reality and circumstances of their meeting. But in true Tremblay form, it will upset you at your core. It may not break you as badly as Cabin at the End of The World, but it is close.

In his brilliant new novel, Tremblay takes on the well-mined small-town, coming-of-age horror trope, transforming it into something so original, it elevates the entire genre." — Booklist (starred review)Oh and bonus-- vampires, of the New England variety, well maybe vampires, well yes for sure we learn about a historical vampire. But are they left to history? Or are they real? So cool Well, I'm 51 years old now. It's been a long time since I did this, but: This book is a piece of shit. mercy accuses him, multiple times, of romanticizing, lying, confabulating, she is incensed at his “libelous portrayal of my dialogue,” but as the book progresses, detailing an aimless life derailed by health issues, paranoia, and substance abuse, her commentary becomes longer and increasingly revealing, and buried beneath mercy's humor and her playful jabs are some heartbreaking realities that eventually—maybe—lead to the truth. I can see this being one of those 'Marmite' books, you either love it or hate it but to me, it seems to be a hugely underrated novel.