The Pallbearers Club

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Seventeen-year-old Art Barbara is not cool, and he is well aware of this. He is six feet tall, extremely thin and lanky, and does not have many friends. So, as a senior in high school, he decides to start the Pallbearers Club. Members will volunteer to act as pallbearers at funerals that are poorly attended. Since Art isn’t very popular, he only gets two people to join at first, but putting up flyers advertising the club gets him an additional member: Mercy Brown. Art and Mercy bond over music and their love of such genres as punk, post-punk and goth. 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. Our editorial style lends itself to young adult fiction,” adds Kasturi. “CZP embraces the dark, the bizarre, the unusual. So many teens feel isolated or different and are looking for that outlet. ChiTeen will offer the same dark and weird stories with strong writing that CZP is known for, just with subject matter more suited for a younger audience.” ...more 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 TREMBLAY: Although as their relationship sort of goes through three-plus decades, it's one of those relationships that I think both people realize, you know, they've - they're good for each other, but they're also, like, the worst people for each other.

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? 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 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.

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TREMBLAY: (Imitating Boston accent) Art Barbara (laughter). But I think Mercy's more - her problem more with it is just that he's renaming himself for the purposes of the memoir. And I think she suspects right away, when he names her Mercy, it's a reference to sort of a unique corner of New England folklore. A cleverly voiced psychological thriller from the nationally bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World and Survivor Song. Decades later, Art tries to make sense of it all by writing The Pallbearers’ Club: A Memoir. But somehow this friend got her hands on the manuscript and, well, she has some issues with it. And now she’s making cuts. OMG this is the book you need to get your sweaty, graspy hands on this year if you consider yourself a horror fan of any standing (and yes, yes I do). A HUGE fan of Tremblay’s dark, bleak and beautiful novels, I was absolutely thrilled when the lovely folks at Titan approved my review request for ‘The Pallbearer’s Club’ which is out NOW

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 GlobeHope is believing there’ll be another moment of joy,and despair is knowing there won’t be one more.’ 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. 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.

But do we? It’s as if you have written this book specifically to deny us the truth, with Mercy deconstructing and undermining Art’s memoir from the margins.

Paul Tremblay

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. This is where I continue to ask you questions and you continue to skillfully parry them, but what is it like to have your story in someone else’s hands? Paul Tremblay delivers another mind-bending horror novel. . . . The Pallbearers Club is a welcome casket of chills to shoulder.”— Washington Post Another note: as the book goes on, the playfulness decreases and the terror increases. It's like a sound mixing board. The playful slide moves down and the terror one up and up. Decades later, Art tries to make sense of it all by writing The Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. But somehow this friend got her hands on the manuscript and, well, she has some issues with it. And now she's making cuts.

Years later in an attempt to make sense of events that occurred, Art writes the Pallbearers Club: A Memoir.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 I remember writing that line. That was a moment where my pandemic life sneaked in. You think you’re writing about something else, but it creeps in there. My mother lives alone. She was shielding and we would speak each day by video call, but it was the first time that I really confronted our ages and our mortality. It’s the precise tone I wanted for the book, though; I wanted it to go inward and to go bleak. I wrap myself around your leg and I sift myself through your very essence. I shark within your cells, and I breathe you all in TREMBLAY: I know. I just think there's so much fun ways to play in sort of that liminal space because, you know, memory, identity, even existence is a lot more malleable and strange and unknowable than, you know, we like to think during our day-to-day. Memory and identity are very much wrapped up in this book. Like, Art yearns to be, you know, someone who he isn't. You know, what is his actual identity? Like, are his memories sort of faulty? Are - you know, are both Art and Mercy - it's not only is - which one is lying? Like, to me, it's like, well, maybe they're both not lying. Like, I mean, there's space for that, too, just because, you know, of the ambiguity of the things that they're experiencing. 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.