The Pallbearers Club

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If your looking for a spine tingling thriller this is definitely not it. If you are looking for a boring, long drawn out, confusing look into a love hate relationship between two “friends” with a weird paranormal twist this might be the book for you. An extraordinary novel. This book is fun, warm, sad, and most of all, profoundly humane: it subverts horror tropes and real-life certainties in one go. I loved it and I need to shout it in the streets.”— Francesco Dimitri, author of The Book of Hidden Things and Never the Wind One thing I kept thinking during this book was that Art was awfully obsessed with Mercy considering how small of a role she actually played in his life. It actually made me think that there could be an entirely different thing going on here, that thing where the guy gives way too much meaning when he's attracted to the woman involved. I think that probably would have been more realistic, but it wouldn't give us our emotional arc. But it does tell you how unfulfilling the emotional arc was for me. STAR review in the April 15 issue of Bookliots and on the blog: https://raforall.blogspot.com/2022/04... Because Art is writing his memoir to make sense of it all, but Mercy is reading it too. Mercy thinks Art’s novel – because this isn’t a memoir – needs some work, and she’s more than happy to set the record straight. What if Art didn’t get everything right? Come on, Art, you can’t tell just one side of the story…

The most beautiful and heartbreaking funeral I've been to in a long time, The Pallbearers Club is melancholy, funny, and very cruel, but you won't regret carrying this coffin." – Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of The Final Girl Support Group Co-publishers Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi announced a new imprint for Chi The YA imprint of the dark fiction press ChiZine Publications A horror? A thriller? A vampire story or just one about our mortal condition and friendship? I'll let you decide, because I do not know the answer and I'm happy with that. One of the best, most intriguing horror novels I’ve read in many years, The Pallbearers Club is also Paul Tremblay’s crowning achievement, sure to be embraced by literary fiction devotees and horror lovers with equal fervor. It’s a high-wire act most writers would never attempt.” An intimate novel told as a conversation between its two main players-- Art and Mercy-- as Art writes his "memoir" and Mercy provides her commentary on his "novel." Told from 1988-2017, readers get to know both characters very well, enough to know that while we want to give both a big hug, we cannot trust either.. The result, a story that is both touching and terrifying, snarky and serious, immersive and compelling.and puberty has hit Art Barbara hard - he's a painfully socially awkward teenager, underweight, acne-ridden, and bent crooked by scoliosis. Worse, he has no extra credits to get him into college. So Art starts the Pallbearers’ Club, dedicated to mourning the homeless and lonely – the people with no one else to bury them. It might be a small club, unpopular and morbid, but it introduces Art to Mercy Brown, who is into bands, local history, folklore and digging up the dead. Mercy seeing one of Art’s fliers about the club decides to join. Mercy was a bit older and in Jr. College, constantly smoked weed, and was way cooler than Art but she seemed to like him and thought the club was interesting. But she had an odd habit of bringing her Polaroid Camera with her and took lots of pictures of the dead. She also knew a bit a freaky folklore that involved digging up the dead. 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?

they met during art's senior year of high school, when mercy responded to art's ad recruiting members for the pallbearer's club; a group created by art as a sort of professional mourner service for people who died without family and friends to see them off into the great beyond. Art Barbara, noted from the front piece as the author of this novel/memoir, writes in an ever increasing stream of consciousness technique, with long, looping sentences, about the decades long danse macabre between himself, and Mercy Brown.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?

This book was confusing at times but in the best possible way. It’s uniquely written as the main character Art’s memoir with annotations by other characters in the margins. It took a good chunk of the book to get into because it was like nothing was happening. However, once it did I was hooked! It was creepy and atmospheric and I loved the friendship between the characters Art and Mercy. The horror elements were unique and were interwoven perfectly with real life. Being set in the 80’s I really enjoyed the references as well. It is clear from the start that this is not your average psychological thriller. Truly, it is difficult to pigeonhole this novel as one specific genre, as it encapsulates qualities from many distinctly different areas of writing. Blurring the lines between fiction and memory, supernatural and ordinary, Paul Tremblay's latest work is nothing short of enthralling.”— Erie Reader Very disappointed. I thought of pushing through to the end but this was a group read where many people said I needn't bother and I'm more than happy to take that advice. I've got better things to spend my reading time on. I will gather my thoughts for my full review in the next few days, but everyone take notice-- this is the best Horror novel of 2022 so far. Here is an example of a note I took: This book is Tremblay's take on coming of age, small town horror first made popular by Stephen King, but like he did for the "Exorcism" novel in A Head Full of Ghosts, he has taken on a tried and true trope as his foundation and transformed it into something so new and original, that it elevates the entire genre as a result.

Another reviewer on Goodreads states in his review "I found it ok, but I think many people will be angered by it.", which was amazingly prescient, because every time I opened this book, I grew angrier and angrier. How dare they publish this crushing bore? The weird friendship is....not that weird. Not at all interesting. Boring. The book is so floridly overwritten that when something DOES happen, I didn't even catch it because Art's prose is so purple that it just seems like more claptrap.

Next year I’m publishing another short story collection. It’s called The Beast You Are, and because I so obviously know what the mainstream reading public wants, the title story is a 30,000-word anthropomorphic animal novella that features a giant monster and a cat that’s a slasher… oh, and it’s also written in free-verse. A stark evocation of a lonesome New England life. . . While Tremblay is a detailed and deft writer, this is his greatest embrace yet of the tools available in literature alone. And oh, what he’s done with it." — Vol. 1 Brooklyn Hope is believing there’ll be another moment of joy,and despair is knowing there won’t be one more.’What is the horror at play in this novel, then? Because it isn’t easily pinned down. What themes are you tussling with? Mercy finds the Memoir, which she insists is actually fiction and nothing more than a novel, and corrects where she sees fit. Adding her own details to what she feels Art got wrong. So the reader gets to hear a lot of her narrative on certain parts of the books. clearly, there's a lot going on in tremblay's latest, and ain't none of it easy to summarize intelligibly in a little book report (i do not envy anyone tasked with BISAC-ing this one), but let's give it a shot... that is a good example of art's prose-stylings; dripping with self-deprecation, laden with ominous foreshadowing and unnecessarily grandiose language, and mercy's more lively, conversational voice is a breath of fresh air as she rewrites his-story, often better, and certainly less self-consciously, than his own version of events. Paul Tremblay just keeps getting better, and THE PALLBEARERS CLUB may be his most transcendent work to date. It’s a psychological thriller, a horror novel and a coming-of-age tale, and has enough appropriate humor sprinkled in without ever being campy. The book threatens to reach cult status, which is the highest compliment I can give it.