Paul Tremblay

A cleverly voiced psychological thriller about an unforgettable—and unsettling—friendship, with blood-chilling twists, crackling wit, and a thrumming pulse in its veins—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.

The Pallbearers Club

High Fidelity

Memory is a fucked-up thing, especially as time passes,

stretches, and yawns. Your comparison of time to a shuffled deck

of cards comes close to the truth, or a truth.

Does the adult you, the one who knows what is going to happen next to that kid, truly remember how you felt at seventeen? Is that kid forever trapped inside you, as easy to recall as the name of your first pet? All memoirs must trade in emotional ventriloquism; it’s part and parcel of a memoir’s allure. I’m more interested in the answer to this: Is it fair to young Art to be so harshly judged by someone who’s had decades to craft his responses?

I wondered if she was thinking something awful about me. We all think awful things about the ones we’re closest to. She followed it up with “You were always so creative. I’m sure it’s great because you’re very talented at everything you do, and I can’t wait to read it.” She said it with such sincerity, I felt awful for thinking she was thinking awful things about me.

(If/when this book is ever published, I wonder, will it hold up your wobbly legged couch or chair, will it be a door-stop or a bookend holding up the more beloved books, will you lend it to a friend to never see it again, will you donate it to a library or callously throw it into a donation bin, or will you leave it on a dusty shelf until you die and someone else then has to sort out what to do with it, as though the responsibility of the book was a curse to be passed on to the unsuspecting?)

𓆩 𓆪

Those Internet searches don’t last long, though, and then I randomly scroll through social media feeds and blogs of people I know or used to know and then total strangers and sometimes I pretend to be those other people, and it’s a relief, and I imagine I’m like them, or like you: angry and sad, yes, but also dumbly hopeful.

What if the part you so achingly want to fix, change, banish, or destroy is the part that is fundamentally you?

There’s a part of me that thinks/hopes/wishes none of this is real. I haven’t asked for help because I’m afraid to learn I could’ve been helping myself all along and I’ve wasted so much time, a lifetime, and I haven’t asked for help because I’m trying my best and I don’t want to know my best isn’t good enough, will never be good enough, and I don’t ask for help because help means coping with the terrible thing and I don’t want to cope, to simply go on, and I childishly think coping hides the fact that there is no purpose and no reason for anything.

We are our own parasite. We consume our secrets, our thoughts, our memories, our identities. We consume everything and we are consumed by everything.

The Pallbearers Club quotes

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