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THE PALLBEARERS CLUB

Paul Tremblay

A cleverly voiced psychological thriller about an unforgettableand unsettling friendship, with blood-chilling twists, crackling wit, and a thrumming pulse in its veinsfrom 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 unforgettable and unsettling friendship. Paul Tremblay is the nationally bestselling author of Survivor Song, The Cabin at the End of the World, A Head Full of Ghosts, and more. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, among others, and he has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards.
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Published 2022-07-05 by William Morrow

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UK / Commonw.: Titan Books ; Czech: Dubrovsky ; Spain: Nocturna

In his brilliant new novel, Tremblay (Survivor Song, 2020) takes on the well-mined small-town, coming-of-age horror trope, transforming it into something so original, it elevates the entire genre... Everyone's reliability is questioned - reader included - and all are held captive until the extremely disquieting conclusion. For fans of thought-provoking, pervasively creepy horror that crawls under the skin and won't let go...

THE PALLBEARERS CLUB is an NPR Best Books of 2022 and a Library Journal Best Horror of 2022

Books can have teeth. A whole mouthful of them. The Pallbearers Club has a whole lifetime of them.

THE PALLBEARERS CLUB is one of Apple's Most Anticipated of 2022 Read more...

...What's real and what's not? Wait. This is fiction. None of it is real. But Tremblay ensnares the readers so well one doesn't dare stop reading THE PALLBEARERS CLUB. Read more...

16 HORROR NOVELS TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2022: "Definitely one to read..." Read more...

The Pallbearer's Club is Tremblay at his most audacious best. It's such a sneaky mindblower! It'll burrow deep inside you, and by the end, you'll be wondering if the room you're sitting in, the people you're talking with, or even your own memory, are real. This book is horror's answer to Nabokov's Pale Fire.

Paul Tremblay's 2022 hair-raising horror novel takes an awkward high school relationship based on shared fringe interests (volunteer pallbearing, for one) and fast-tracks it into the future, when writer Art tries unraveling the truth of his high school friend... This intense, razor-sharp thriller blends book genres, but we can say for sure that it belongs among the best vampire books Read more...

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.

13 Upcoming Horror Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2022: "...Tremblay's knack for ambiguous horror keeps you guessing while blurring the genre lines. It makes his latest upcoming horror book an instant must-read." Read more...