The Pallbearers Club – Paul Tremblay Book Review

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“Horror is a full-color thing.”

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It’s been a hot minute since we had an outright horror book review here on What We Reading. It’s not that the genre hasn’t suddenly dropped off our radars or anything like that; it’s just harder for us to embrace our inner spookiness during the summertime fully. Our bad. Paul Tremblay has been on our radar for some time now as one of the best horror authors active right now, and we’ve seen his 2022 novel, The Pallbearers Club, lining the shelves of a few bookstores. So, with the slightest hints of a chilly breeze now hanging in the air, we thought it would be the best time to kickstart our spooky season and see what this Bram Stoker award winner was all about. Ready for our thoughts about this vampire-infused commentary on growing up, friendships, and nostalgia? Check out our The Pallbearers Club book review below! 

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Date Published: 2022 

Author: Paul Tremblay 

Genre: Horror, Thriller 

Pages: 278

Goodreads Rating: 3.09/5

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The Pallbearers Club Summary

Art Barbara is a seventeen-year-old high school loner in the late 1980s who listened to hair metal, had to wear a monstrous back brace for his scoliosis, and who started a volunteer pallbearers club for poorly attended funerals. There, he meets the coolest girl he has ever met: Mercy. Someone who thinks the Pallbearers Club was cool. She even brought along her Polaroid camera to take pictures of the corpses, and carries an obsessive knowledge of grizzly New England folklore. Soon, strange things – terrifying things – happen when she’s around. 

Decades on, Art attempts to make sense of it all by writing The Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. But, somehow, his 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. 

What Worked

The Pallbearers Club has a really gothic and eerie premise, with the idea of a loner boy growing up alongside this cool, could-be-a-vampire best friend in a lonely pallbearers club, hooking us in from the start. 

One of the other big elements of The Pallbearers Club that sucked us in was the structure of the novel. Tremblay writes the book from the perspective of Art Barbara, jumping back and forth in time in a manner that encourages us to view him as an unreliable narrator who might not have a full grasp of the reality of his situation. Alongside his commentary, we are given commentaries and bits of criticism from Mercy in the sidebars, which makes for a fun and original inclusion. These inserts provide a lot of The Pallbearers Clubs’ charm and humour and, as we’ll explain later, provide a welcome restbite from Art’s narration. 

On Mercy, she’s easily the highlight of the book. She’s quirky, confident, and a fascinating individual to follow, whether she’s the focus of Art’s attention or commenting on his recollections. 

What Didn’t

Off the bat, this book is wordy. As a first impression of Paul Tremblay’s books, there were so many instances of us having to go back and re-read a whole section because the language became so flowery it was genuinely impossible to work out what we were meant to be picturing. The decision to have next to no paragraph breaks throughout the novel makes this issue even worse. 

But, here’s the thing: this book is naturally full of commentary and criticisms from Mercy that echo most of the complaints that we readers will have for The Pallbearers Club. It shows an awareness from Tremblay about his own imperfections as a writer, which makes criticising the book a little bit more complicated. Had it not been for the self-aware, self-deprecating humour about the language, we might have struggled to finish this one. 

For a book called The Pallbearers Club, there isn’t actually a whole lot of an actual Pallbearers Club here. The story is at its best when we’re living through teenage Art Barbara’s formative years alongside Mercy, trying to work out what the whole mystery is with him, her, and their relationship. Having an adult Art hogging about half the book, commenting on it doesn’t do such a creepy, gothic, mysterious setup the justice it deserves. 

Verdict

As an overall commentary, this book isn’t scary, it isn’t especially supernatural, and it doesn’t particularly capitalise on its eerie, gothic potential. Nor does it fully capture the magic that could have come from the mystery and intrigue that Art and Mercy’s early years together could have conjured. 

It won’t be lost on anyone reading The Pallbearers Club that this book is Paul Tremblay’s commentary on his own coming-of-age. There’s nothing bad about that, and he does do a good job in identifying a premise that retains that, whilst still infusing it with a creepy bit of fictional horror. 

There are plenty of instances where Art’s commentary or Mercy’s criticisms made us chuckle, and there’s definitely more than a glimpse into what could have been between the pair of them. However, The Pallbearers Club just doesn’t capitalise on the potential that is undoubtedly there. Unfortunately, it’s a bit too lyrical, a bit too autobiographical, and not nearly enough spooky for us. 

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Our Rating: 3.5/5

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