Paul Tremblay delivers another mind-bending horror novel. . . . The Pallbearers Club is a welcome casket of chills to shoulder.”— Washington Post The Pallbearers Club is Tremblay at his most audacious best. It's such a sneaky mindblower! It'll burrow deep inside you, and by the end, you'll be wondering if the room you're sitting in, the people you're talking with, or even your own memory, are real. This book is horror's answer to Nabokov's Pale Fire." — Sarah Langan, author of Good Neighbors Another reviewer on Goodreads states in his review "I found it ok, but I think many people will be angered by it.", which was amazingly prescient, because every time I opened this book, I grew angrier and angrier. How dare they publish this crushing bore? The weird friendship is....not that weird. Not at all interesting. Boring. The book is so floridly overwritten that when something DOES happen, I didn't even catch it because Art's prose is so purple that it just seems like more claptrap.

Melancholy and funny as well as dark and complex, this novel will be the dark hit of the summer. Unique in terms of style and format, The Pallbearers Club occupies a peculiar place between a thriller, a horror novel, and a narrative that will make you question everything." — Boston Globe 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. Rating 10: Loved it so much. Mixing humor, horror, and a whole lot of pathos, “The Pallbearers Club” is Tremblay’s best work. You’re an author who generally eschews tropes, or you deconstruct them to the point where they're no longer recognizable. I was surprised to see you take on the vampire in The Pallbearers Club. There's no horror here, just a character study that amounts to one whiny, self-absorbed dude ranting endlessly and one snarky, manic pixie dream girl commenting throughout. Also something about vampires?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. The development of the relationship between Art and Mercy was the key to my enjoyment of this read. Will something terrible happen? When will something terrible happen? Is the worst always to come? The worst is always to come.’

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.In his brilliant new novel, Tremblay takes on the well-mined small-town, coming-of-age horror trope, transforming it into something so original, it elevates the entire genre." — Booklist (starred review) 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.

Another note: as the book goes on, the playfulness decreases and the terror increases. It's like a sound mixing board. The playful slide moves down and the terror one up and up. Well, I'm 51 years old now. It's been a long time since I did this, but: This book is a piece of shit. BOND: Paul Tremblay's new book is "The Pallbearers Club." Paul, thank you so much for talking about this with us today.Well, my first love, in terms of horror, was movies. Before I took to reading later, I learned about story through film, and as a writer who uses the influence of other books and other media, it would be highly hypocritical for me to have a problem with someone using my story to make something different. There is something very interesting in that to me, how someone can take the bones of a story and make something adjacent to it. Of course, no writer is ego-less, and it will be strange if and when there are differences between the two tellings—because it is sobering that once a movie is made, in the eyes of the wider culture, that IS the story. Millions of people will see this movie, compared to the few hundred thousand who have read Cabin. TREMBLAY: So first, like, '80s nostalgia's been sort of peddled for so long, you know, with - obviously, with "Stranger Things" probably being the most obvious. 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. 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.