The Pallbearers Club: A Novel

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

Washington Post

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

New York Times"Melancholy and funny as well as dark and complex, this novel will be the dark hit of the summer. Unique in terms of style and format, The Pallbearers Club occupies a peculiar place between a thriller, a horror novel, and a narrative that will make you question everything."

“A jaunty, character-driven exploration of a complicated friendship, [The Pallbearers Club] is more emotional than [Tremblay’s] previous novels, and more innovative. . .[T]his delightfully morbid and surprisingly emotional horror novel demonstrates Tremblay’s literary range.”

Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Road of Bones and Ararat"The Pallbearers Club is a sinuous, mercurial novel that shifts under your very eyes like a trick of the light. This is Paul Tremblay's most dazzling book yet, and that's saying something. I was left breathless."

“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.”

Esquire

“Uncertainty is Tremblay’s stock-in-trade. Over the last decade, he has grown from hot new thing to horror icon without compromising on his uniquely inexplicable nightmares.”

Weekend Edition (NPR) on The Pallbearers Club "Books can have teeth. A whole mouthful of them. The Pallbearers Club has a whole lifetime of them."

“[A] deliciously confusing thriller.”

a Nabokovian labyrinth that sustains its mystery past the point few writers but Paul Tremblay would risk.”

“The Pallbearers Club constructs a maze of uncanny ambiguity and disquiet

Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual and No One Gets Out Alive

“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.”

and bickering over what may or may not be a vampire story

“The Pallbearers Club sits right at the intersection of the unreliable call and response of memory and truth. Replete with the trademark brilliant characterization, intricate switchback plotting and general weirdness you get with a Paul Tremblay novel, Art and Mercy’s friendship

Francesco Dimitri, author of The Book of Hidden Things and Never the Wind

“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.”

a story where we stare into the gaping, black maw of darkness and something quietly beckons us to look deeper.”

“A uniquely devastating portrait of love, loss, family, and friendship that will equally enchant and terrify readers. Paul Tremblay reinvents the horror genre with this masterpiece of blurred fact and fiction

Priya Sharma, the award-winning author of Ormeshadow

“This is horror at its most heartfelt, horror that confirms our fears and flaws, the insecurities that we carry with us from our formative years.”

Stephen King on Survivor Song

“Absolutely riveting. I haven’t been able to put it down.”

NPR

“Survivor Song is a small horror story. A personal one. A fast and terrible one that is committed beautifully to the page. . . . It exists in a pandemic world where all choices are bad ones. Where things unravel faster than you can possibly believe. Where happy endings are transactional: they come with a cost. Because Survivor Song isn’t a fairy tale. It's a horror story.”

Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters and Wounds

“For the past few years, Paul Tremblay has been setting the standard for modern horror. His genius is that he never forgets the core of a great horror novel resides first in its characters. In Survivor Song, he revitalizes the zombie novel by keeping the focus narrow and intimate: two women, in the space of a few hours, just trying to get across town. The result is heartfelt and terrifying, in a narrative that moves like a bullet train.”

Booklist (starred review)

“Tremblay has earned worldwide acclaim because he is able to seamlessly combine reality with speculative elements, and his newest may be his most prescient yet. . . Gorgeously written about terrible things, the relatively short Survivor Song is a good choice for fans of pandemic epics . . . and novels that probe themes of friendship, family, and social commentary amidst chillingly realistic horror.”

About the Author

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Massachusetts Book Awards and is the New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie: A Novel, The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil's Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin.His essays and short fiction have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and numerous "year's best" anthologies. He lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts, with his family and has a master's degree in mathematics.

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