Review: The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay
After falling out of love with Stephen King, I often credit Paul Tremblay as the author who got me back into contemporary horror fiction with his novel A Headful of Ghosts (still my favourite of his books). This is the first time I've been able to read an ARC of his, and I was very excited.
Tremblay is well-known for taking traditional horror tropes -- the exorcism, the house invasion, the zombie apocalypse -- and reinventing them with a cool 21st-century twist. In The Pallbearers Club, he takes on the vampire novel. To a certain extent, one's enjoyment of Tremblay's books might be predicated on how much the reader already enjoys the trope. The exorcism is certainly my favourite trope that he has covered, and equates to my favourite book. But this isn't always the case. Tremblay's style and craft are such that he can break down the jaded horror fan -- he even made me like a zombie novel. So I'm not sure if it's my luke-warm feelings towards vampires that made this one a bit of a miss for me.
The Pallbearers Club is a maybe-novel, maybe-memoir of Art Barbara, a self-degrading punk nerd from Rhode Island. His 'manuscript' is interspersed with annotations and corrections by his friend, Mercy Brown (name changed to protect the not-so-innocent). As Art details a school history project he completed on the local myth of the Mercy Brown vampires, he starts to suspect the story might not be a myth.
Art was one of my main difficulties getting into the book. The first half is very 'entitled but self-loathing white teenage boy', as Mercy herself points out in an annotation. In this opening, it's difficult not to feel that Mercy is actually the interesting character who we want to know more about. It feels like Tremblay is playing on the narrators of classic gothic fiction, like Frankenstein and Dracula, where the narrators are far from the most interesting part of the story, and the reader almost has to enjoy the book in spite of the person telling the story. The introduction to The Pallbearers Club, a community support group to ensure the lonely and outcast dead have some attendance at their funeral, segues into a lengthy description of Art getting into punk music, and I very nearly put the book down during this first half as I struggled to see where the interest in the story was for me.
However, this is a book of two halves. Once Art becomes an adult and moves out, and once the big reveal about the 'reality' of vampirism makes it clear the direction the story is taking, the whole thing becomes a much quicker read. I still struggled to like or get behind Art as a narrator, but Mercy became a much bigger part of the story, and their two points of view began to diverge in a way that was really interesting.
One major issue for me was also reading this as an ebook. In the physical copy, Mercy's annotations are written in small handwriting-style text in the margins of the book. In the ARC I read, the annotation would appear in a larger font at the end of the relevant paragraph -- and some of the paragraphs in this book are pages long. On release day, the Kindle version of the book was pulled for reformatting, so my assumption is this is a problem that's getting fixed, but if you're buying on Kindle, my suggestion would be to get a sample first to check you're happy with the formatting.
The Pallbearers Club will appeal to existing fans of Tremblay’s work, and those who are looking for something new in the vampire subgenre. Some readers might be fine or even identify with the narrator, removing the issue of struggling to find someone to relate to in the book. For those who try the book and struggle, I strongly advise at least giving this book to the halfway point before making a terminal decision.
The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay is out now, and can be purchased here.
With thanks to the publishers and Netgalley.co.uk for an e-advanced review copy.