The Pallbearers Club
The Pallbearers Club
Select a format:
Publisher's Hardcover ©2022--
To purchase this item, you must first login or register for a new account.
HarperCollins
Annotation: A volunteer pallbearer for poorly attended funerals, Art Barbara, a 17-year-old loner in the 1980s, meets a cool girl who has an obsessive knowledge of strange, terrifying things that he tries to make sense of years later while writing a book that she begins making cuts to.
 
Reviews: 3
Catalog Number: #360630
Format: Publisher's Hardcover
Publisher: HarperCollins
Copyright Date: 2022
Edition Date: 2022 Release Date: 07/05/22
Pages: 278 pages
ISBN: 0-06-306991-1
ISBN 13: 978-0-06-306991-6
Dewey: Fic
LCCN: 2023275136
Dimensions: 24 cm
Language: English
Reviews:
Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

“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. Agent: Stephen Barbara, InkWell Management. (July)

Reviewing Agencies: - Find Other Reviewed Titles
ALA Booklist
Library Journal
Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)
Reading Level: 12.0
Interest Level: 9+

“Paul Tremblay delivers another mind-bending horror novel . . . The Pallbearers Club is a welcome casket of chills to shoulder.” – Washington Post

A cleverly voiced psychological thriller from the nationally bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World and Survivor Song.

What if the coolest girl you’ve ever met decided to be your friend?

Art Barbara was so not cool. He was a seventeen-year-old high school loner in the late 1980s who listened to hair metal, had to wear a monstrous back-brace at night for his scoliosis, and started an extracurricular club for volunteer pallbearers at poorly attended funerals. But his new friend thought the Pallbearers Club was cool. And she brought along her Polaroid camera to take pictures of the corpses.

Okay, that part was a little weird.

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?

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.


*Prices subject to change without notice and listed in US dollars.
Perma-Bound bindings are unconditionally guaranteed (excludes textbook rebinding).
Paperbacks are not guaranteed.
Please Note: All Digital Material Sales Final.