The Pallbearers Club

         

Title: The Pallbearers Club

Author: Paul Tremblay

Publisher: William Morrow, July 19, 2022

Pages: 292

Genre: Psychological Thriller

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.

Let's start with the positive. I LOVE a vampire. I had NO idea that this was a vampire novel. This was a very pleasant surprise for me. Not that it needed to be a surprise, I feel like a cursory browse of the tags for this book would have clued me in. But this was simply a book club pick, so I borrowed it from the library and got to it. 

I love a mockumentary, and I love footnotes! This has both. But....I didn't like this. That's not entirely accurate. I DID like Mercy/Mary's editing/annotating/footnotes. They did help to sow confusion and distrust between me, the reader, and Art, the writer. But this felt...forced, I guess.

This kind of felt like he really wanted to write an ode to pop culture and literary allusion, but also wanted to make sure we knew that he "wasn't taking himself seriously." Which, ultimately, made it feel like he's taking himself way too seriously and also not owning it. Maybe it's more on the nose than I took it, but *shrug*. 

I will say, other than the surprise vampire reveal, the not surprise vampire ending was my favorite part.

Ratings

Stars: 3/5