The Pallbearers Club

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There's no horror here, just a character study that amounts to one whiny, self-absorbed dude ranting endlessly and one snarky, manic pixie dream girl commenting throughout. Also something about vampires? Before we even get to the uncanny and possibly supernatural elements of The Pallbearers Club, the very nature of the club itself is such a strange idea. Where did that come from?

This is horror at its most heartfelt, horror that confirms our fears and flaws, the insecurities that we carry with us from our formative years.”— Priya Sharma, the award-winning author of Ormeshadow 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 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... Any new book by Paul Tremblay makes me sit up straight. Part of the joy is not knowing what to expect from each new story.”— Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual and No One Gets Out Alive

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I also just did not buy all the supernatural stuff. The Mercy commentary is fantastic, and what this book does quite well is leave you with a question of "did this really happen?" Is Art making all this up? Or is Mercy covering up secrets she doesn't want anyone to know? The ambiguity walks a fine line, but it walks it very well. It walks it so well that I wish the rest of the book had more there there! The supernatural stuff was never really scary, I found it confusing more often than not. The "story" revolves around Art Barbara, a social outcast High Schooler who suffers from Scoliosis. 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 Will something terrible happen? When will something terrible happen? Is the worst always to come? The worst is always to come.’

I am losing you and the loss is aching and delicious and bottomless and as addictive as the gain, as the replacing. 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.

a gangly, scoliosis-stooped loner, art was immediately drawn to the enigmatic and effortlessly cool mercy, who became his virgil into pot, punk music, and the wonders of providence, both its contemporary (for them) club scene and its eerie historical legends, like the one about mercy brown, a notable woman whose story is known to all of little rhody's babygoths. Hope is believing there’ll be another moment of joy,and despair is knowing there won’t be one more.’ TREMBLAY: Yeah. You know, I was a - math was always my best subject, so I didn't really - in a - as a high school student - or even in undergraduate, I was a math major, I didn't stray too far from that. But when I discovered King, I was like, oh, these aren't, like, dusty stories and gothic halls and things like that - you know, the stuff I had - I was forced to read when I was taking English classes. He's writing about, like, my dad, who worked in a factory for 25 years. And he's writing about my mom, who was a bank teller. So to me, that was, like, instant credibility, for me, as a reader, was seeing, oh, here are people, at least at that point in time, I hadn't actually really seen represented in the fiction that I was certainly taught. Years later in an attempt to make sense of events that occurred, Art writes the Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. I can see this being one of those 'Marmite' books, you either love it or hate it but to me, it seems to be a hugely underrated novel.

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. 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) - 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? If there was a problem, and yes for me there was, it's the ever-explaining wordiness of Art Barbara who writes the memoir here. It doesn't continuously occur though, which makes me wonder if there's a message behind it. The time in between the best plot elements (beginning, middle and a spot-on ending) are not interesting enough to carry the story forward in any way except in passing the years.

Paul Tremblay

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.” 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 His essays and short fiction have appeared in the New York Times, 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. 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. Rating 10: Loved it so much. Mixing humor, horror, and a whole lot of pathos, “The Pallbearers Club” is Tremblay’s best work.