The Pallbearers Club

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It is clear from the start that this is not your average psychological thriller. Truly, it is difficult to pigeonhole this novel as one specific genre, as it encapsulates qualities from many distinctly different areas of writing. Blurring the lines between fiction and memory, supernatural and ordinary, Paul Tremblay's latest work is nothing short of enthralling.”— Erie Reader

TREMBLAY: So for one, I started with Art as really sort of, like, a stand in for my high school self. And I think, for so many people, you know, despite, like, the lens of nostalgia that we see everywhere in pop culture now, high school was difficult. High school was - you know, for especially people who weren't considered popular or the in crowd - was obviously a hard thing to do. So part of it was honestly a little bit of wish fulfillment, that I wish I had a friend like Mercy.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? 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. Here is an example of a note I took: This book is Tremblay's take on coming of age, small town horror first made popular by Stephen King, but like he did for the "Exorcism" novel in A Head Full of Ghosts, he has taken on a tried and true trope as his foundation and transformed it into something so new and original, that it elevates the entire genre as a result. 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.

A cleverly voiced psychological thriller from the nationally bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World and Survivor Song. 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? Seamlessly blurring the lines between fiction and memory, the supernatural and the mundane, The Pallbearers’ Club is an immersive, suspenseful portrait of an unforgettable and unsettling friendship.So not everything is autobiographical then? After The Pallbearers Club , something occurred to me. Could you still write a biography? Is anything left? 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. 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.

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. Rating 10: Loved it so much. Mixing humor, horror, and a whole lot of pathos, “The Pallbearers Club” is Tremblay’s best work. Actually, I feel like a lot of my books have taken on tropes head-on. A Head Full of Ghosts dealt with possession; Survivor Song is a zombie-adjacent novel. I just try different ways to approach them. For years, my friend [and fellow horror writer] John Langan has been asking me when I’m going to write my vampire novel, but I had no ideas. Then I discovered the legend surrounding Mercy Brown, this supposed vampire from New England folklore. I hadn’t heard of her until a very few years ago, but the legend does seem to have become more popular in the last decade. What is the horror at play in this novel, then? Because it isn’t easily pinned down. What themes are you tussling with?

The story itself is a manuscript , and it starts out with “Art Barber” writing a memoir on the heels of turning 50. He has changed the names to protect the identities, but basically it’s a detail of his life, starting at age 17 to the present that chronicles when he first met “Mercy” and the start of their unusual friendship. 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? Co-publishers Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi announced a new imprint for ChiZine Publications (CZP) to focus on Young Adult fiction. Called “ChiTeen,” the first title will be The Unlikely But Totally True Adventures of Floating Boy and Anxiety Girl by Paul Tremblay and Stephen Graham Jones, scheduled for release in spring 2014. The "story" revolves around Art Barbara, a social outcast High Schooler who suffers from Scoliosis.