The Pallbearers Club

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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, bestselling author of The Final Girl Support Group The "story" revolves around Art Barbara, a social outcast High Schooler who suffers from Scoliosis.

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.Next year I’m publishing another short story collection. It’s called The Beast You Are, and because I so obviously know what the mainstream reading public wants, the title story is a 30,000-word anthropomorphic animal novella that features a giant monster and a cat that’s a slasher… oh, and it’s also written in free-verse. 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

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. The rest of this chapter? Jesus, man. The idea that you were going to sell/publish this as a memoir is batshit insane. 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. If there was a problem, and yes for me there was, it's the ever-explaining wordiness of Art Barbara who writes the memoir here. It doesn't continuously occur though, which makes me wonder if there's a message behind it. The time in between the best plot elements (beginning, middle and a spot-on ending) are not interesting enough to carry the story forward in any way except in passing the years.

Paul Tremblay

So not everything is autobiographical then? After The Pallbearers Club , something occurred to me. Could you still write a biography? Is anything left?

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. Any new book by Paul Tremblay makes me sit up straight. Part of the joy is not knowing what to expect from each new story.”— Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual and No One Gets Out Alive BOND: And I understand that during your recovery that summer, you came under the spell of another New England writer, Stephen King. Was there something about his books in particular that also influenced you?TREMBLAY: (Imitating Boston accent) Art Barbara (laughter). But I think Mercy's more - her problem more with it is just that he's renaming himself for the purposes of the memoir. And I think she suspects right away, when he names her Mercy, it's a reference to sort of a unique corner of New England folklore. Here is an example of a note I took: This book is Tremblay's take on coming of age, small town horror first made popular by Stephen King, but like he did for the "Exorcism" novel in A Head Full of Ghosts, he has taken on a tried and true trope as his foundation and transformed it into something so new and original, that it elevates the entire genre as a result.