The Pallbearers Club

Product Information

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. Nothing happens. Ever. There is NO STORY, just self-indulgent memory porn and two self-obsessed dud characters. Paul Tremblay delivers another mind-bending horror novel . . . The Pallbearers Club is a welcome casket of chills to shoulder.” – Washington Post

I sense you leaving, and I want to say a single word that somehow means sorry, please don't go, help me, it's not your fault, I wish it wasn't my fault, goodbye. 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 You’re an author who generally eschews tropes, or you deconstruct them to the point where they're no longer recognizable. I was surprised to see you take on the vampire in The Pallbearers Club.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. 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.

Well, who isn’t obsessed with truth? Especially in this age of misinformation when you have to invest so much more work into identifying what is true. But it’s also an issue of character. As a reader, I’m far more interested in fallible characters who make terrible mistakes and the decisions that led to those mistakes—decisions that were based on whatever information they had at the time. That’s the human part of fiction. It’s the human part of being human. That’s why I have a fondness for what I call the first-person asshole narrator. The kind of narrator who is not very good, but they are still trying. Books like William Kennedy Tool’s A Confederacy of Dunces. That kind of narrator tests my empathy, and my ability to connect with characters who are unsavory, or who make poor decisions. Will something terrible happen? When will something terrible happen? Is the worst always to come? The worst is always to come.’ I don't really know what more to say. It was pointless, I didn't like either of the main characters, and I'm far too lazy to try and read into all the clever allusions and innuendos and metaphors etc. AIN'T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR DAT. 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? Tremblayhas earned worldwide acclaim because he is able to seamlessly combine reality with speculative elements, and his newest may be his most prescient yet. . . Gorgeously written about terrible things, the relatively short Survivor Songis a good choice for fans of pandemic epics . . .and novels that probe themes of friendship, family, and social commentary amidst chillingly realistic horror.”— Booklist(starred review) -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.

Seamlessly blurring the lines between fiction and memory, the supernatural and the mundane, The Pallbearers Club is an immersive, suspenseful portrait of an unusual and disconcerting relationship. Critical Praise 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. Bleak is something you’ve done before, but that inward turn feels like a departure, especially compared to your last two novels. I started with the notion that Art would represent me on a different life path. What would have happened, for instance, if I’d dropped out of college to play in punk bands? I always tend to start with some autobiographical question like that, and then I see where it goes. Of course, I’ve leaned into it much more heavily with this book. Striking the balance was the biggest challenge of the book by far. There were things that I wrote that seemed really clever, but then I had to tell myself, “Paul, no one will get this reference about that thing that happened that one time when you were fifteen.” In the end, it was broader stuff like music and family. Art has a very interesting relationship with his parents in this book, and a lot of that is drawn from my own high school years. 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.if you want your copy to have spikes, you're gonna have to DIY—bookstores and libraries frown on that kinda thing. their friendship changed his life, but the precise nature of that change is the crux of this he said/she said account; a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-unreliable-narrator that depends on whether you believe art, who insists on referring to his book as a memoir, or mercy, who is equally insistent on reclassifying it as a novel. 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? 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.

PAUL TREMBLAY: (Reading) I am not Art Barbara. That is not my birth name. But at the risk of contradicting myself within the first few lines of a memoir, I am Art Barbara. Co-publishers Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi announced a new imprint for Chi The YA imprint of the dark fiction press ChiZine Publications 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. 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?What is the horror at play in this novel, then? Because it isn’t easily pinned down. What themes are you tussling with? And then Mercy appears and so begins her side of the story for as you read, she annotates, interferes and comments on Art’s narration and soon you find your perceptions jostling alongside hers. For the past few years, Paul Tremblay has been setting the standard for modern horror. His genius is that he never forgets the core of a great horror novel resides first in its characters. In Survivor Song, he revitalizes the zombie novel by keeping the focus narrow and intimate: two women, in the space of a few hours, just trying to get across town. The result is heartfelt and terrifying, in a narrative that moves like a bullet train.”— Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monstersand Wounds