2023 Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel (nominee)
2023 Locus Award for Best Horror Novel (nominee)
"Delightfully morbid and surprisingly emotional" —The New York Times
A chilling and twisty horror of toxic friendships, punk rock and vampire parasites from the Bram Stoker award-winning modern master of horror and author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts.
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.
Genre: Horror
"Books can have teeth. A whole mouthful of them. The Pallbearers Club has a whole lifetime of them." - Stephen Graham Jones
"THE PALLBEARERS 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 Nabakov's Pale Fire." - Sarah Langan