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. 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 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.

Seventeen-year-old Art Barbara is not cool, and he is well aware of this. He is six feet tall, extremely thin and lanky, and does not have many friends. So, as a senior in high school, he decides to start the Pallbearers Club. Members will volunteer to act as pallbearers at funerals that are poorly attended. Since Art isn’t very popular, he only gets two people to join at first, but putting up flyers advertising the club gets him an additional member: Mercy Brown. Art and Mercy bond over music and their love of such genres as punk, post-punk and goth. A cleverly voiced psychological thriller from the nationally bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World and Survivor Song.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. So not everything is autobiographical then? After The Pallbearers Club , something occurred to me. Could you still write a biography? Is anything left? 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.

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. I remember writing that line. That was a moment where my pandemic life sneaked in. You think you’re writing about something else, but it creeps in there. My mother lives alone. She was shielding and we would speak each day by video call, but it was the first time that I really confronted our ages and our mortality. It’s the precise tone I wanted for the book, though; I wanted it to go inward and to go bleak.The development of the relationship between Art and Mercy was the key to my enjoyment of this read. This book was confusing at times but in the best possible way. It’s uniquely written as the main character Art’s memoir with annotations by other characters in the margins. It took a good chunk of the book to get into because it was like nothing was happening. However, once it did I was hooked! It was creepy and atmospheric and I loved the friendship between the characters Art and Mercy. The horror elements were unique and were interwoven perfectly with real life. Being set in the 80’s I really enjoyed the references as well.

BOND: Paul Tremblay's new book is "The Pallbearers Club." Paul, thank you so much for talking about this with us today.

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. they met during art's senior year of high school, when mercy responded to art's ad recruiting members for the pallbearer's club; a group created by art as a sort of professional mourner service for people who died without family and friends to see them off into the great beyond.

BOND: Right. In some ways, what was more unsettling than the question of, like, is Mercy actually a vampire feeding off of Art or maybe even turning him into a vampire? - actually, the far more unsettling thing is we just don't know, as the reader, who's telling the truth here. 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: Have you ever had that friend who seems to reappear at times throughout your life, and you gravitate towards each other, yet the friendship has never been a good influence on you? For me, that was the crux of this whole novel and something I found simply captivating and extremely endearing. I hope that doesn't class as a spoiler.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. if art is meant to be paul tremblay/not paul tremblay, it’s not a very kind self-portrait, either in his physical descriptions, his behavior, or his writing skills, which—as art—are frequently turgid and overwritten. concerning the surgery to correct his scoliosis: 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.