The Pallbearers Club

Product Information

Years later in an attempt to make sense of events that occurred, Art writes the Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. Co-publishers Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi announced a new imprint for Chi The YA imprint of the dark fiction press ChiZine Publications A horror? A thriller? A vampire story or just one about our mortal condition and friendship? I'll let you decide, because I do not know the answer and I'm happy with that. Because Art is writing his memoir to make sense of it all, but Mercy is reading it too. Mercy thinks Art’s novel – because this isn’t a memoir – needs some work, and she’s more than happy to set the record straight. What if Art didn’t get everything right? Come on, Art, you can’t tell just one side of the story… 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.

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. Critical Praise 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 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? Rating 10: Loved it so much. Mixing humor, horror, and a whole lot of pathos, “The Pallbearers Club” is Tremblay’s best work.

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 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. 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? Mercy seeing one of Art’s fliers about the club decides to join. Mercy was a bit older and in Jr. College, constantly smoked weed, and was way cooler than Art but she seemed to like him and thought the club was interesting. But she had an odd habit of bringing her Polaroid Camera with her and took lots of pictures of the dead. She also knew a bit a freaky folklore that involved digging up the dead. The Pallbearers Club constructs a maze of uncanny ambiguity and disquiet—a Nabokovian labyrinth that sustains its mystery past the point few writers but Paul Tremblay would risk.”— Ramsey CampbellFor 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 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. An intimate novel told as a conversation between its two main players-- Art and Mercy-- as Art writes his "memoir" and Mercy provides her commentary on his "novel." Told from 1988-2017, readers get to know both characters very well, enough to know that while we want to give both a big hug, we cannot trust either.. The result, a story that is both touching and terrifying, snarky and serious, immersive and compelling. but her reactions to what art's written about her are just as often desperately sincere—wounded by his misperceptions of her and her intentions. Neither of them can be belived-or can they?-as they identify the names are pseudonyms, chosen for their relation to the punk music scene of the 1980’s and the myth/legend of the New England Vampire, also named Mercy Brown. So they identify themselves as unreliable narrators even as narrate the relative reality and circumstances of their meeting.

I will gather my thoughts for my full review in the next few days, but everyone take notice-- this is the best Horror novel of 2022 so far. Well, you can find some people who say that A Head Full of Ghosts is funny, though I wouldn’t have anticipated that. Obviously, horror and humor are so closely related—you can react to life’s absurdities by laughing ruefully or being terrified. I knew that I was going to be fairly brutal to the ‘me’ character, so I guess I wanted to cut that with some kind of humor as well. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about reading and writing as an escape. That’s not me. Reading is not an escape, and writing is work. But this was the first time that writing a book did offer some kind of way out of reality, even if it was into the past that I curated, and crafted, and fictionalized.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? i don't know if i succeeded in my goal of summarizing this intelligibly, but i certainly plopped out a lot of words, so imma tie it off here, WITH ONE MERCY-LIKE MARGINAL NOTE: