The Pallbearers Club: A Novel

Paul Tremblay

Jul 2022 · HarperAudio · Narrated by Graham Halstead, Xe Sands, and Elizabeth Wiley

About this audiobook

“Paul Tremblay delivers another mind-bending horror novel . . . The Pallbearers Club is a welcome casket of chills to shoulder.” – Washington Post

A cleverly voiced psychological thriller 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 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.

Ratings and reviews

Definitely ranks lower in Paul Tremblay novels. This book is focused on 2 main characters. It isn't scary so don't be put off from horror category. The very beginning and end were great. 80% of the rest of the book is quite mediocre and gets old quickly. Would have loved if the book stuck with introductory theme. Would have been more fitting.

More of a 4.5 then a straight 5 I thought this was an interesting way to tell this kindof story. You really get a feel for both of the characters and how everything that happened affected them. It captures that failed artist feeling very well and led to some very interesting moments. Basically good characters and some really interesting visuals and a relateable to some premise. A look into the diffrence between handing out blame and asking for help as a solution to life problems. A PERSONAL NOTE This is entierly a me thing but the only reason I didn't give it a full out 5 is because there is a point where Mercy requests AA battries for her polaroid camera and no polaroid camera uses battries. The battery is part of the film pack that's why they are so expensive (a point she brings up a lot) and I just can't stop thinking about it. but yeah overall 4.5/5

About the author

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book Awards and is the nationally bestselling author of Horror Movie, The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. Another is his first children’s book. He has been teaching high school math for a long, long, time, and he lives outside Boston with his family.