that is a good example of art's prose-stylings; dripping with self-deprecation, laden with ominous foreshadowing and unnecessarily grandiose language, and mercy's more lively, conversational voice is a breath of fresh air as she rewrites his-story, often better, and certainly less self-consciously, than his own version of events.

BOND: What was it about this particular time period that really lent itself to this story or maybe shaped the story as you told it? One of the great pleasures of Gothic fiction lies in its insistence that the past (to quote Faulkner) isn’t dead, it isn’t even past. In a Gothic novel, dark histories linger in gloomy castles, musty antiquarian bookshops, crumbling graveyards and dusty attics, just waiting to attach themselves to the living.

Paul Tremblay

It is clear from the start that this is not your average psychological thriller. Truly, it is difficult to pigeonhole this novel as one specific genre, as it encapsulates qualities from many distinctly different areas of writing. Blurring the lines between fiction and memory, supernatural and ordinary, Paul Tremblay's latest work is nothing short of enthralling.”— Erie Reader Before we even get to the uncanny and possibly supernatural elements of The Pallbearers Club, the very nature of the club itself is such a strange idea. Where did that come from?

Rating 10: Loved it so much. Mixing humor, horror, and a whole lot of pathos, “The Pallbearers Club” is Tremblay’s best work. Well, you can find some people who say that A Head Full of Ghosts is funny, though I wouldn’t have anticipated that. Obviously, horror and humor are so closely related—you can react to life’s absurdities by laughing ruefully or being terrified. I knew that I was going to be fairly brutal to the ‘me’ character, so I guess I wanted to cut that with some kind of humor as well. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about reading and writing as an escape. That’s not me. Reading is not an escape, and writing is work. But this was the first time that writing a book did offer some kind of way out of reality, even if it was into the past that I curated, and crafted, and fictionalized. BOND: Right. Right. And along the way, Art comes to believe something about Mercy that Mercy disputes. Art believes she is a New England vampire. So what is a New England vampire? Where did this idea come from? The most beautiful and heartbreaking funeral I've been to in a long time, The Pallbearers Club is melancholy, funny, and very cruel, but you won't regret carrying this coffin." — Grady Hendrix, bestselling author of The Final Girl Support Group A horror? A thriller? A vampire story or just one about our mortal condition and friendship? I'll let you decide, because I do not know the answer and I'm happy with that.Well, I'm 51 years old now. It's been a long time since I did this, but: This book is a piece of shit. This is where I continue to ask you questions and you continue to skillfully parry them, but what is it like to have your story in someone else’s hands? Oh and bonus-- vampires, of the New England variety, well maybe vampires, well yes for sure we learn about a historical vampire. But are they left to history? Or are they real? So cool A new novel from Paul Tremblay is always cause for celebration. The Pallbearers Club has it all--growth and decay, metatextual playfulness and earnest terror, dark hilarity and deep melancholy. For a book that looks death squarely in its sightless eye this one is just brimming over with life and inventiveness.I loved floating and falling through time with Art Barbara and Mercy." — Karen Russell, New York Times bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Orange World

His essays and short fiction have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family. What is the horror at play in this novel, then? Because it isn’t easily pinned down. What themes are you tussling with? Paul Tremblay delivers another mind-bending horror novel . . . The Pallbearers Club is a welcome casket of chills to shoulder.” – Washington Post The development of the relationship between Art and Mercy was the key to my enjoyment of this read.

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A cleverly voiced psychological thriller from the nationally bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World and Survivor Song. The horror of the self, I think. All of my books have been interested in that, I think. I’m fascinated by the ambiguity of our inner spaces: memory and identity and even reality itself. I think all of those are wrapped up in The Pallbearers Club, because even though Art spends so much time—basically the entire book—writing about himself, he remains a mystery to himself. I think there is both horror and humor in that realization. That’s the thin line that I was trying to walk. But do we? It’s as if you have written this book specifically to deny us the truth, with Mercy deconstructing and undermining Art’s memoir from the margins. Books can have teeth. A whole mouthful of them. The Pallbearers Club has a whole lifetime of them." --Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of My Heart Is a Chainsaw I sense you leaving, and I want to say a single word that somehow means sorry, please don't go, help me, it's not your fault, I wish it wasn't my fault, goodbye.

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.”— Francesco Dimitri, author of The Book of Hidden Things and Never the Wind Here is an example of a note I took: This book is Tremblay's take on coming of age, small town horror first made popular by Stephen King, but like he did for the "Exorcism" novel in A Head Full of Ghosts, he has taken on a tried and true trope as his foundation and transformed it into something so new and original, that it elevates the entire genre as a result. Neither of them can be belived-or can they?-as they identify the names are pseudonyms, chosen for their relation to the punk music scene of the 1980’s and the myth/legend of the New England Vampire, also named Mercy Brown. So they identify themselves as unreliable narrators even as narrate the relative reality and circumstances of their meeting.Mercy finds the Memoir, which she insists is actually fiction and nothing more than a novel, and corrects where she sees fit. Adding her own details to what she feels Art got wrong. So the reader gets to hear a lot of her narrative on certain parts of the books. Co-publishers Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi announced a new imprint for Chi The YA imprint of the dark fiction press ChiZine Publications 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. BOND: Right. In some ways, what was more unsettling than the question of, like, is Mercy actually a vampire feeding off of Art or maybe even turning him into a vampire? - actually, the far more unsettling thing is we just don't know, as the reader, who's telling the truth here.