BOOK REVIEW: THE PALLBEARERS CLUB BY PAUL G. TREMBLAY

28/6/2022

It contains some of the more genuinely creepy scenes I’ve read in quite some time. It’s also got every bit of the emotional pull of Tremblay’s earlier works; populated with exceptionally well fleshed-out characters that you will very quickly grow attached to and the things they are forced to confront throughout the course of the book are not exactly what you would describe as pleasant.

THE PALLBEARERS CLUB
By Paul G. Tremblay

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Titan Books (5 July 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1789099005
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1789099003

A Review By George Ranson

Whenever I sit down to pen a review of a Tremblay book, I can’t help but feel that everyone who knows me must automatically expect me to write something flowery and full of praise. My admiration for Tremblay’s work is well known among my small circle of bookish friends. The fact that those assumptions are typically proven accurate does little to assuage a genuine concern about things such as predictability and, even worse, any impression of bias. But I’m here to say with all honesty that every word of praise I’ve ever heaped on Tremblay’s work (and heaped, I have) has been truly sincere and entirely well-deserved.

As a matter of fact, I will fully admit that when I first heard about his latest project, a memoir-slash-novel whose inconsistencies and loose adherence to the truth are continually called into question by one of two unreliable narrators in notations hand-written in glaring red ink along page margins throughout the book, even I was a little dubious. There is no question THE PALLBEARERS CLUB is unlike any of Tremblay’s previous books. Which should come as no surprise to those already familiar with Tremblay’s work, as no book of his is really like any of the others. He seems to be constantly reinventing himself. And in a genre in which a certain amount of success can often be found in little more than a simple adherence to tried and true formulae, Tremblay’s willingness, which may be better described as eagerness, to continually experiment with a writing style that has garnered such critical and commercial success is commendable and, yes, even brave. Imagine if New York Yankees Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio had changed bats after every game of his 56-game hitting streak, an idea which I’m certain Joltin’ Joe never for a moment entertained. Why would he? Don’t fix what isn’t broken, right?

Yet this is exactly what Paul Tremblay does. Over and over again. And still his hitting streak continues.

THE PALLBEARERS CLUB introduces us to Art Barbara, a socially awkward high school senior who, in addition to being branded as something of an outcast, is forced to deal with the unfortunate and debilitating effects of a severe case of scoliosis. Art has a fondness for punk rock music and a desperate desire to leave his small-town life behind. With this as his ultimate goal, Art decides to create The Pallbearers Club in an effort to bolster his college acceptance prospects which, while strong academically, are woefully lacking in extracurricular activity. The idea is that members of TPC will volunteer at local funeral homes as pallbearers and attendees at funeral services conducted for the recently departed homeless and elderly who may not have many (or any) loved ones left to bear witness to their passage into the great beyond. It is during the second service attended by the club that Art meets Mercy, an unapologetically forthright and mysterious girl with the macabre habit of photographing both the living and the dead with her ever-present Polaroid camera in an attempt to discover evidence of lingering spirits. Mercy (the author of the ubiquitous red-inked notations mentioned earlier) will play alternating roles of friend and nemesis throughout the remainder of the book. She and Art come together and drift apart over the course of many years. The drifting apart always precipitated by the strange and often terrifying things that seem to happen whenever Mercy is around.

I mentioned earlier that no two Trembly books are alike. While that is certainly true in terms of the path he takes to get his stories across, I found the kind of creeping horror found in THE PALLBEARERS CLUB to be very much like that found in Tremblay’s fantastic, Bram Stoker Award-winning novel A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS. TPC is a quirky, strange, and, at times, humorous book. But make no mistake, the kind of cleverly ambiguous, what-the-hell-is-going-on-here scares that are so emblematic of Tremblay’s work are most certainly there. And they are there in spades. To that point, there is a line in the book that I consider to be among the scariest sentences ever written in a horror novel (slash memoir). I hesitate to reveal it because it would be a tad spoilery. But I put it right up there with “And I think she’s still waiting for her goodnight kiss” from Stephen King’s ONE FOR THE ROAD and “Good God! Whose hand was I holding?” from Shirley Jackson’s brilliant THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE. I trust you will know it when you read it by the shivers running up and down your spine.

Believe me, THE PALLBEARERS CLUB is the kind of book that will make you hesitant to turn out the lights at bedtime. It contains some of the more genuinely creepy scenes I’ve read in quite some time. It’s also got every bit of the emotional pull of Tremblay’s earlier works; populated with exceptionally well fleshed-out characters that you will very quickly grow attached to and the things they are forced to confront throughout the course of the book are not exactly what you would describe as pleasant.

THE PALLBEARERS CLUB is now among my very favorites of Tremblay’s’s books. I simply cannot recommend it enough.

And I mean that sincerely.

The Pallbearers’ Club
by Paul Tremblay

The Bram Stoker award-winning modern master of horror reinvents vampires, from the author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts.

1988, Art Barbara is a painfully shy/socially awkward teenager, underweight, acne-ridden, and suffering from scoliosis when he starts the Pallbearers’ Club. Members volunteer as mourners for the homeless and lonely, those with no one else to bury them. Art recruits his former bully, Eddie Patrick, a fellow slacker Cayla, and the mysterious Mercy Brown. Art and Mercy quickly form an intense friendship, but one day Art takes a photo of Mercy, and captures a strange parasitic creature wrapped around her.

George Ranson

George is a lifelong fan of horror fiction with a particular interest in small press and indie authors. He is also a proud member of the Horror Community on social media. You can find him on Twitter as Book Monster @Sshh_ImReading