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 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.

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. in this book, the narrator mentions being at club babyhead in the 90s, a club yours truly also frequented in the 90s. therefore, it is within the realm of possibility that karen brissette (the one who is ME, and not the character from tremblay's novel A Head Full of Ghosts) fictionally crossed paths with the pseudonymous narrator (who may or may not be paul tremblay), at that club or any of the other providence institutions namedropped in this book, and all i gotta say about that is JEEZ, tremblay, stalk much?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 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. Paul Tremblay delivers another mind-bending horror novel. . . . The Pallbearers Club is a welcome casket of chills to shoulder.”— Washington Post

BOND: And I understand that during your recovery that summer, you came under the spell of another New England writer, Stephen King. Was there something about his books in particular that also influenced you? Well, my first love, in terms of horror, was movies. Before I took to reading later, I learned about story through film, and as a writer who uses the influence of other books and other media, it would be highly hypocritical for me to have a problem with someone using my story to make something different. There is something very interesting in that to me, how someone can take the bones of a story and make something adjacent to it. Of course, no writer is ego-less, and it will be strange if and when there are differences between the two tellings—because it is sobering that once a movie is made, in the eyes of the wider culture, that IS the story. Millions of people will see this movie, compared to the few hundred thousand who have read Cabin. I am losing you and the loss is aching and delicious and bottomless and as addictive as the gain, as the replacing. 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.Actually, I feel like a lot of my books have taken on tropes head-on. A Head Full of Ghosts dealt with possession; Survivor Song is a zombie-adjacent novel. I just try different ways to approach them. For years, my friend [and fellow horror writer] John Langan has been asking me when I’m going to write my vampire novel, but I had no ideas. Then I discovered the legend surrounding Mercy Brown, this supposed vampire from New England folklore. I hadn’t heard of her until a very few years ago, but the legend does seem to have become more popular in the last decade. Will something terrible happen? When will something terrible happen? Is the worst always to come? The worst is always to come.’ Well, you can find some people who say that A Head Full of Ghosts is funny, though I wouldn’t have anticipated that. Obviously, horror and humor are so closely related—you can react to life’s absurdities by laughing ruefully or being terrified. I knew that I was going to be fairly brutal to the ‘me’ character, so I guess I wanted to cut that with some kind of humor as well. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about reading and writing as an escape. That’s not me. Reading is not an escape, and writing is work. But this was the first time that writing a book did offer some kind of way out of reality, even if it was into the past that I curated, and crafted, and fictionalized.

The changeover to punk to him was a revelation because here were musicians doing something different. Here were musicians that were oftentimes in their lyrics saying something is terribly wrong. I guess, as dark as punk music can be sometimes, to me, that's, like, a hopeful act, the idea of saying, hey, we're exposing, like, a terrible truth here. And I think horror stories do the same thing. It's hopeful because, you know, there's that shared recognition that something's terribly wrong, whether or not we can fix it. You know, hopefully we can. Paul Tremblay just keeps getting better, and THE PALLBEARERS CLUB may be his most transcendent work to date.... The book threatens to reach cult status, which is the highest compliment I can give it." And what about music? Punk is very present in this book. Particularly the work of Hüsker Dü, a band I’d never previously heard of. 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.One of the great pleasures of Gothic fiction lies in its insistence that the past (to quote Faulkner) isn’t dead, it isn’t even past. In a Gothic novel, dark histories linger in gloomy castles, musty antiquarian bookshops, crumbling graveyards and dusty attics, just waiting to attach themselves to the living. Rating 10: Loved it so much. Mixing humor, horror, and a whole lot of pathos, “The Pallbearers Club” is Tremblay’s best work. 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? I went in cold and I recommend you do, too. Thankfully the summary doesn't ruin most of the book, rare these days, and it understands what this book wants to be all about, friendship (and 80's punk music). I wish it really was about those things, I just found the actual plot to not live up to the concept. 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.