The Pallbearers Club: A Novel

3.25 stars.

This was not what I was expecting. It wasn't exactly a horror story but it did invoke some emotions. I wasn't a fan of most of the tone. I thought the side notes and things in red were creative and entertaining.

omfg I hated this book so much in the beginning. I would've liked the whole teenage thing a lot more when I was an actual teenager. as much as I wished for something to happen during much of this book, now that I've finished it, it's really sticking with me. was mercy/mary really a vampire (were the last few pages memoir/truth?) or was she becoming what he needed her to be? was she even mary/mercy? was she the woman from the first viewing, Kathleen? are we supposed to believe art fell victim to his delusions? does mercy essentially stalking him count towards her being a vampire or towards fueling arts delusions? was she even a vampire or an interdimensional being?

my enjoyment reading this book was like a 2 but the thoughts I'm left with are a 3.75 leaving me with a ~3 rating overall.

edit: still thinking about this book and how it reminds me of how ephemeral youth is and of the mystery the universe held and how sad life is and how we will never know. a mysterious memory that that sticks with you all your life.

I knew people like this, but they were all British (obvs) and I can imagine that had I been born in the US, they would have been exactly like this chap. Very interesting and just the right amount of weirdness.

Ik hield echt van dit idee en de manier waarop het was geschreven. Het audioboek is zeker een meerwaarde hierbij, met hoe Mercy werd geportretteerd. Maar het verhaal op zich was eigenlijk wel saai en sleepte een beetje te lang aan. Het eindigde wel heel goed.

I appreciate Paul that even if I'm not super into a book there's always stuff I like about it and he's always exploring something real weird and interesting. 

In Paul Tremblay's “The Pallbearer's Club,” readers are introduced to an unlikely friendship between high school senior Art Barbara and his charismatic punk-loving friend, Mercy. Art's unusual extra-curricular activity, volunteering at a funeral home, becomes the backdrop for a series of peculiar occurrences.

Tremblay's novel can mislead those expecting a pure horror story. While there are horror elements and subtle nods to the supernatural, they take a back seat to the relationship between the two main characters and the narrative's exploration of trust and perception. The use of Art's annotated memoir as a storytelling device adds layers of ambiguity and complexity, leaving readers to decide whom to believe.

Tremblay blends elements of the supernatural into a narrative of friendship and trust that gives “The Pallbearer's Club” its unique charm. It is a genre-defying tale that keeps readers engaged until the very end, continually questioning the true nature of the events unfolding.

“I am gravid with exhaustion; the splitting and multiple existences drains me.”

holy fuckin vampires. this book was uniquely written & i enjoyed it, it's on the slower more character driven side but i didn't have a problem with it at all!

This book was not what I expected it to be and it was not for me. I loved the format, super cool and different, and the few pages of horror did scare me a bit. However, there weren't very many of them and the book as a whole was extremely different from what I thought it was going to be.

So different and so very good. I loved the ambiguity and I loved the entire premise. Tremblay grabbed me by the collar way back with Head Full of Ghosts and I've been a fan ever since. The format here is also ridiculously fun.

I'm so disappointed that I didn't like this. I've read two five stars, two four stars, and one three star by Tremblay, so I have pretty high expectations that I'll like his work at this point. The Pallbearers Club had such a different vibe from the rest of his work, and I hesitate to even classify it as horror. It's more like a literary thriller, but one that I found myself pretty bored by. The novel itself is meant to be a memoir written by the fictional Art Barbara (a pseudonym), but the ‘memoir' has been found by Art's friend Mercy, whose notes fill the margins, her words quite literally filling in the gaps that Art leaves out. Art and Mercy have a complicated relationship, spending years estranged before finding one another yet again. This was... so meandering, and I couldn't connect with either of the characters. Art was self-absorbed and irritating, and Mercy just didn't feel real to me. I'm hoping Tremblay's next book works better for me again.

I'm not sure how to best describe this book. I'm shelving it as “horror” because that's good enough for my own bookshelves, and there are certainly horror elements, but it is really a metafictional take on memoirs/memories, combined with historical fiction and horror and sprinkle in some humor while you're at it; slaps cover of book this bad boy can fit so many genres in it.

I was wary of this at first, because even though I've yet to read a Paul Tremblay novel that I didn't at least like, the book is asking the reader to be on board for an atypical reading experience. Which I dig, but I have to be in the headspace for it, and I was worried I wouldn't be able to slog through the sesquipedalian loquaciousness in which “Art” frequently indulges. But you get the hang of it, and “Mercy” has such a conversational tone that you feel like you're really experiencing the story with her and it bridges any disconnect you may feel. Or it did for me, at least.

I don't know what else to say. What an ambitious book, with a killer soundtrack to boot. It's definitely not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but it was certainly mine. 4 Hüsker Dü songs out of 5.

Weird book

Paul Tremblay is certainly versatile. Where his last novel, Survivor Song, was a fast paced slam bang adventure, this one is much more introspective and measured. It's a tale of thwarted hopes and the disappointments of life that most readers of a certain age will be able to empathize with, told as a memoir of a life-defining friendship but also punctuated with interjections from that friend, who is often less than impressed with the author's version of events. It's a great conceit that elevated my enjoyment of the novel. I mean, I knew was going to like it anyway as soon as I saw the contents page and realised that all the chapters were named after Hüsker Dü songs, but this sealed the deal. The supernatural element is kept ambiguous throughout, and you'll have to read till the end to discover if it is an actual horror novel, or a story of an awkward young man's instabilities and projections (hey, why can't it be both?), but that won't be a problem, because it's an excellently readable book.