The Pallbearers Club: A Novel

by Paul Tremblay

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The most intense, strange and curious meet-cute you’ll read this year. How could it NOT be? Paul Tremblay combines suspense, horror and vampirism like no other. How do we view our past? Is it through rose-colored glasses or revisionist history? As in a nightmare, the past is real/not real, and no amount of head shaking can make it clear. The fog of memoir is scary territory.

“Paul Tremblay delivers another mind-bending horror novel . . . The Pallbearers Club is a welcome casket of chills to shoulder.” – Washington Post

“Uncertainty is Tremblay’s stock-in-trade. Over the last decade, he has grown from hot new thing to horror icon without compromising on his uniquely inexplicable nightmares.” – Esquire

“[A] deliciously confusing thriller.” – Weekend Edition (NPR)

A cleverly voiced psychological thriller from the nationally bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World and Survivor Song.

What if the coolest girl you’ve ever met decided to be your friend?

Art Barbara was so not cool. He was a seventeen-year-old high school loner in the late 1980s who listened to hair metal, had to wear a monstrous back-brace at night for his scoliosis, and started an extracurricular club for volunteer pallbearers at poorly attended funerals. But his new friend thought the Pallbearers Club was cool. And she brought along her Polaroid camera to take pictures of the corpses.

Okay, that part was a little weird.

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?

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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063069916
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	07/05/2022
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	18,005
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of Growing Things, The Cabin at the End of the World, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.

Editorial Reviews

05/30/2022

“I am not Art Barbara,” declares the narrator of this ambitious, metafictional pseudo-vampire thriller set in 2007 from Tremblay (Survivor Song), but he adds he’ll be calling himself that throughout the memoir that follows. In 1988, Art began the Pallbearers Club in high school in Beverly, Mass., to serve as attendants at funerals that would otherwise be without mourners. One member of Art’s club is the pseudonymous Mercy Brown, named by Art after a late 19th-century New England vampire. Mercy contributes to the “manuscript” that is this book, sniping at Art’s characterizations of her and appending extended remarks to each chapter. Art, an unsuccessful musician who’s constantly doubting himself, comes to believe that Mercy is a vampire, subtly leeching life from him, and that he’s a vampire as well. Eventually, Art has recurring sightings and visions of jackets with faces draining the life from victims. Tremblay has a way with words (“Time is not linear but a deck of cards that is continuously shuffled”), and Mercy’s snarky commentary contrasts nicely with Art’s often maudlin narrative. This one will find a certain readership, but its overall oddness will keep it niche. Agent: Stephen Barbara, InkWell Management. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"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 Chainsaw

"A new novel from Paul Tremblay is always cause for celebration. The Pallbearers Club has it all—growth and decay, metatextual playfulness and earnest terror, dark hilarity and deep melancholy. For a book that looks death squarely in its sightless eye this one is just brimming over with life and inventiveness. I loved floating and falling through time with Art Barbara and Mercy." — Karen Russell, New York Times bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Orange World

“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.” 
— Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Road of Bones and Ararat

"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, bestselling author of The Final Girl Support Group

"The Pallbearers Club is Tremblay at his most audacious best. It's such a sneaky mindblower! It'll burrow deep inside you, and by the end, you'll be wondering if the room you're sitting in, the people you're talking with, or even your own memory, are real. This book is horror's answer to Nabokov's Pale Fire." — Sarah Langan, author of Good Neighbors

"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)

“Absolutely riveting. I haven’t been able to put it down.” — Stephen King on Survivor Song

“Survivor Song is a small horror story. A personal one. A fast and terrible one that is committed beautifully to the page. . . . It exists in a pandemic world where all choices are bad ones. Where things unravel faster than you can possibly believe. Where happy endings are transactional: they come with a cost. Because Survivor Song isn’t a fairy tale. It's a horror story.” — NPR

“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 Monsters and Wounds

“Tremblay has 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 Song is 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)

From the Publisher

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

"Books can have teeth. A whole mouthful of them. The Pallbearers Club has a whole lifetime of them." 

Stephen Graham Jones

"A new novel from Paul Tremblay is always cause for celebration. The Pallbearers Club has it all--growth and decay, metatextual playfulness and earnest terror, dark hilarity and deep melancholy. For a book that looks death squarely in its sightless eye this one is just brimming over with life and inventiveness. I loved floating and falling through time with Art Barbara and Mercy."

Karen Russell

"The Pallbearers Club is Tremblay at his most audacious best. It's such a sneaky mindblower! It'll burrow deep inside you, and by the end, you'll be wondering if the room you're sitting in, the people you're talking with, or even your own memory, are real. This book is horror's answer to Nabokov's Pale Fire."

Sarah Langan

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.” 

Christopher Golden

"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

Survivor Song is a small horror story. A personal one. A fast and terrible one that is committed beautifully to the page. . . . It exists in a pandemic world where all choices are bad ones. Where things unravel faster than you can possibly believe. Where happy endings are transactional: they come with a cost. Because Survivor Song isn’t a fairy tale. It's a horror story.

NPR

Tremblay has 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 Song is 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)

Absolutely riveting. I haven’t been able to put it down.

Stephen King on Survivor Song

"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)

02/01/2022

In high school, decidedly not-with-it Art Barbara is befriended by a girl who's the epitome of chic when she joins the volunteer pallbearers club he has formed to assist at funerals. That she takes pictures of the corpses is one of many unsettling things about her that boil over decades later when Art writes a memoir about the club. From Bram Stoker/British Fantasy winner Tremblay; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal