The Pallbearers' Club
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
"Delightfully morbid and surprisingly emotional" —The New York Times
A chilling and twisty horror of toxic friendships, punk rock and vampire parasites from the Bram Stoker award-winning modern master of horror and author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts.
1988, 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 is writing his memoir to try and make sense of it all, because nothing about Mercy is simple. It's all a matter of trust, right? Their friendship twists and coils around the pair of them, captured in Polaroid snapshots and sweaty gigs and the freaky, inexplicable flashes of nightmare that lurk in a folded jacket at night.
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…
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I am not Art Barbara," declares the narrator of this ambitious, metafictional pseudo-vampire thriller set in 2007 from Tremblay (Survivor Song), but he adds he'll be calling himself that throughout the memoir that follows. In 1988, Art began the Pallbearers Club in high school in Beverly, Mass., to serve as attendants at funerals that would otherwise be without mourners. One member of Art's club is the pseudonymous Mercy Brown, named by Art after a late 19th-century New England vampire. Mercy contributes to the "manuscript" that is this book, sniping at Art's characterizations of her and appending extended remarks to each chapter. Art, an unsuccessful musician who's constantly doubting himself, comes to believe that Mercy is a vampire, subtly leeching life from him, and that he's a vampire as well. Eventually, Art has recurring sightings and visions of jackets with faces draining the life from victims. Tremblay has a way with words ("Time is not linear but a deck of cards that is continuously shuffled"), and Mercy's snarky commentary contrasts nicely with Art's often maudlin narrative. This one will find a certain readership, but its overall oddness will keep it niche.
