Synopses & Reviews
Books can have teeth. A whole mouthful of them. The Pallbearers Club has a whole lifetime of them. —Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of My Heart Is a Chainsaw
A cleverly voiced psychological thriller about an unforgettable — and unsettling — friendship, with blood-chilling twists, crackling wit, and a thrumming pulse in its veins — 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 unforgettable and unsettling friendship.
Review
“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)
Review
“Books can have teeth. A whole mouthful of them. The Pallbearers Club has a whole lifetime of them.” Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of My Heart is a Chainsaw
Review
“A new novel from Paul Tremblay is always cause for celebration. The Pallbearers Club has it all — growth and decay, metatextual playfulness and earnest terror, dark hilarity and deep melancholy. For a book that looks death squarely in its sightless eye this one is just brimming over with life and inventiveness. I loved floating and falling through time with Art Barbara and Mercy.” Karen Russell, New York Times bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Orange World
Review
"One of the best, most intriguing horror novels I've read in many years, The Pallbearers Club is also Paul Tremblay's crowning achievement, sure to be embraced by literary fiction devotees and horror lovers with equal fervor. It's a high-wire act most writers would never attempt."
Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Road of Bones and Ararat
Review
“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
Review
“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
About the Author
Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of Growing Things, The Cabin at the End of the World, Disappearance at Devil's Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year's-best anthologies. He has a master's degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.