Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book Awards and is the author of Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, 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. He lives outside Boston with his family.
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 unusual and disconcerting relationship.
As I've said in reviews before, I love unreliable narrators. I love how I can never trust them, and thus the story has this added layer of "but is this really how that happened?" This book more than some others I've read has that built in not just with one unreliable narrator, but with two. Art and Mercy both have their own opinions and recollections, and seeing Art's in official type while Mercy's are scrawled throughout the book help support the book's overarching question of memory versus fiction versus real life. Unfortunately, the book feels more concerned with this cool concept being cool than utilizing it to its fullest potential. I wished Mercy interacted with the text a bit more, and that Art wasn't so long-winded. My favorite parts of the book were Mercy's chapter-ending thoughts, and the best part of the book was Mercy's final word. I wish that wasn't the case because of how much potential the premise and structure had.
I was honestly bored and confused by Art's narration 75% of the time. Like I mention above, the story has so much potential, the structure is inventive, and the concept of a Pallbearers Club is definitely a draw. Unfortunately, Art is just so unlikable, and not in the way an unreliable narrator should be. He is whiny and annoying, and when he gets to the good stuff, it's never actually explained in a concise or succinct way. I'm still so confused how he got the vampire theory, and what happens "at night" like what the blurb says. Art, supposedly, had been working on this manuscript for years. Admittedly, this is without professional help, but I feel like if you've had that much time to rewind past events, you would be able to explain them better. I was so confused by the supernatural elements to where I was bored with the story overall, only sticking it out to see what the grand finish would be. And, like I said above, Mercy's last word was the best because it included that big reveal.
This book had so much potential. I just don't think it fully delivered in the way that it could have. It could have been more horrifying, there could have been more description for the supernatural elements that occurred. I didn't buy into Art's and Mercy's friendship, so there could have been more development in that area as well. Instead, this felt like one unlikable man's exploration of his glory days, with a side dose of the supernatural that made sense only to him and the one person he seems to be writing for, even if he never expects her to see the manuscript. In other words, I probably wouldn't recommend this one to anyone, unless they had a very specific taste.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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