The Pallbearers Club

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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. This was a hard book to get through, but I felt somehow compelled to keep going. I mean, this is a big-name author...SOMETHING must be in store for the reader SOON, right? So not everything is autobiographical then? After The Pallbearers Club , something occurred to me. Could you still write a biography? Is anything left?

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? BOND: And thinking about that, this book is very much located in the late '80s. It's a very Gen-X story, right?What an enjoyable read this was. I've fallen in love with Tremblay's writing already, that's after reading just one book. One written in a very original style too. and puberty has hit Art Barbara hard - he’s a painfully socially awkward teenager, underweight, acne-ridden, and bent crooked by scoliosis. Worse, he has no extra credits to get him into college. So Art starts the Pallbearers’ Club, dedicated to mourning the homeless and lonely – the people with no one else to bury them. It might be a small club, unpopular and morbid, but it introduces Art to Mercy Brown, who is into bands, local history, folklore and digging up the dead.

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. 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. If your looking for a spine tingling thriller this is definitely not it. If you are looking for a boring, long drawn out, confusing look into a love hate relationship between two “friends” with a weird paranormal twist this might be the book for you.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. Books can have teeth. A whole mouthful of them. The Pallbearers Clubhas a whole lifetime of them."— Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of My Heart is a Chainsaw 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. 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, New York Times bestselling author of The Final Girl Support Group

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 This book is coffin shaped and glorious, it has been reviewed by quite a few readers as not having much going on, and in terms of action/gore well yes there is an argument to be made about this. But that is the point-it takes such balls to write such a huge novel over such a long period of time and to remain that restrained, that focussed on the life lived after Mercy appears to Art. His transformation, both physical and psychological is this great unravelling and is monstrous in its design and the pay off is so very worth it. Written as a memoir, the story is narrated by 17-year-old Art Barbara, a gangly high school student with severe scoliosis. Hoping to beef up his college applications, Art starts an after-school club, the Pallbearers Club, whose three members attend wakes and funerals. When a mysterious young woman named Mercy Brown joins the group, a life-altering friendship begins.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 we are all someone's monster, but we don't always get the chance to see our monstrous selves through someone else's eyes, and we don't always get a chance to apologize for what we've done. 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. Now, with The Pallbearers Club, his commitment to ambiguity has only grown stronger. The novel presents as a faux-memoir, detailing the early-to-mid manhood of “Art Barbara,” an awkward teen with scoliosis, Marfan Syndrome, and terrible acne. In pursuit of extracurricular honors, Art established the titular Pallbearers Club, where he forms a friendship with the enigmatic Mercy. There are many questions to ponder; whether Mercy is an essence-draining vampire resurrected from local New England lore is only one of them, and not necessarily the most pressing. As Mercy creeps into the text through handwritten commentaries and margin notes, she deconstructs Art’s recollections with increasing acuity. The reader is forced to confront the unavoidable tension between fact and fabrication that underpins all fiction. Can we trust Art? He promises to be “painfully honest,” but how possible is such truth in the face of time and memory and too much self-analysis? And what horror can be mined from that unsteady ground?