The Pallbearers Club

The Pallbearers Club

Paul Tremblay

#7417 of 8,085 books · #700 in Horror

Shortlisted for the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel (2023).

The Pallbearers Club won the Bram Stoker Award. 1988, and puberty has hit Art Barbara hard - he's a painfully socially awkward teenager, underweight, acne-ridden, and bent crooked by scoliosis. Worse, he has no extra credits to get him into college. So Art starts the Pallbearers' Club, dedicated to mourning the homeless and lonely – the people with no one else to bury them. It might be a small club, unpopular and morbid, but it introduces Art to Mercy Brown, who is into bands, local history, folklore and digging up the dead. Decades later, Art is writing his memoir to try and make sense of it all, because nothing about Mercy is simple. It's all a matter of trust, right? Their friendship twists and coils around the pair of them, captured in Polaroid snapshots and sweaty gigs and the freaky, inexplicable flashes of nightmare that lurk in a folded jacket at night. Because Art is writing his memoir to make sense of it all, but Mercy is reading it too. Mercy thinks Art's novel – because this isn't a memoir – needs some work, and she's more than happy to set the record straight. What if Art didn't get everything right? Come on, Art, you can't tell just one side of the story... Seamlessly blurring the lines between fiction and memory, the supernatural and the mundane, The Pallbearers Club is an immersive, suspenseful portrait of an unforgettable and unsettling friendship.