The Pallbearers Club: A Novel

by Paul Tremblay, Xe Sands, Elizabeth Wiley

Genres: Horror; Psychological Thrillers; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

A cleverly voiced psychological thriller about an unforgettable—and unsettling—friendship, with blood-chilling twists, crackling wit, and a thrumming pulse in its veins—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 unforgettable and unsettling friendship.

Release date: July 5, 2022

Publisher: William Morrow

Print pages: 288

Sample

If I Told You

(2007)

Iam not Art Barbara.

That’s not my birth name. But at the risk of contradicting myself within the first few lines of a memoir, I am Art Barbara.

Imagine my personage, the whole of me (I prefer that phrase to “spirit” or “soul”) exists in Plato’s World of Forms. That me, the one slicked in the amber of Greek philosophy, is Art Barbara. Sorry, Mom and Dad, the name you assigned was a valiant effort, but it does not sum up who I was, who I am, or who I will become.

Art Barbara is bold, declarative, striking, and upon first hearing it spoken your brow furrows, head tilts, and mouth smirks. Admit it; your face is in thrall and acting on its own. You might know a Barbara or even an Art, but you haven’t met, nor do you know, Art Barbara.

However, the initial “Oh” upon the shores of appellatory discovery soon gives way to incredulousness, to there-must-be-some-mistake. Let’s be honest, here (and you have my promise I will always be painfully honest) the name tries too hard. It is more than a little ridiculous, shading toward pathetic (a word derived from the Greek pathos, of course), particularly when spoken with a Boston or Rhode Island accent as the coterie of r’s dis- appear into obnoxiously long ah’s. Even without the accent, there’s a slant-rhyme clunkiness to the first two syllables, or three if you insist upon pronouncing Barbara as Bar-bar-ah as opposed to the shortened Bar’bra. Regardless, the combination of the first two syllables, the Art-Bar, forces the speaker to comply, to slow

down and enunciate the harsh coupling before dumping an auditory body into the dark water of r’s and a’s. I make no claim to be an expert of phonesthetics (the study of inherent pleasantness of the sound of words, according to Wikipedia), but clearly Art Barbara is no cellar door.

I saw the name written on the bathroom wall of Club Baby- head, spring of 1991. The letters were capitalized, angular slashes of neon-green ink; a cave painting glowing in the lovely darkness of the early 1990s. I have never forgotten it. And by the end of this memoir, neither will you.

Isn’t time strange? Time is not linear but a deck of cards that is continuously shuffled.

I will change all names to protect the innocent and not-so. I will take great care to choose the names appropriately. As astounding and beyond-belief the goings-on to be detailed are, the names will be the only fictions.

Beyond the act of communication, sharing my story and ex- perience and life, exploring fear and fate and the supernatural (for lack of a better word) and the unknown universe big and small, vulnerable confessions, and base gossip (Truman Capote and the nonfiction novel this is not), perhaps a lame excuse or two for lifelong disappointments and why I am and where I will be, the purpose is hope. Hope that one reader or one thousand and one readers might empathize with the “why” behind the poor decisions I made, make, and most certainly will make.

I assume you intended for me to find this. Maybe that’s
a lot for me to assume. Maybe it’s not. I mean, you left it on your cluttered desk with a literal yellow bow tied around the manuscript. Holy shit, I bet I’ll have a lot to say about this book based on the opening chapter.

Art Barbara. Jesus, dude.

I promise my commentary will be as honest as you are claiming to be. That sentence by itself makes it sound like I am already accusing you of lying. I don’t mean to. We’ve had our ups and downs, but I’ve always considered you to be one of my dearest, oldest friends, and I hope you feel similarly.

Frankly, I’m a little scared to read more, to find out what you really think of me.

Based on the title, I don’t think it’s vanity to assume I’ll playa large role in this, um, memoir.

Memory is a fucked-up thing, especially as time passes,
stretches, and yawns. Your comparison of time to a shuffled deck of cards comes close to the truth, or a truth. I think time is better represented as a house of cards, an unimaginably large castle of cards, one in which rooms and entire wings collapse and are endlessly rebuilt. Those collapsed rooms and wings hold memories, both personal and collective. That card house is forever
haunted by the lost memories and by the ones that are retained but changed.

Sorry, I know this is your book, not mine.

It occurs to me if our memories of certain events differ, that doesn’t necessarily mean one or both of us are lying, certainly not lying on purpose.

I’ll attempt to keep my comments solely to after each chapter. I will read and comment as I go without skipping ahead. I can’t promise that I won’t mark stuff up within the manuscript though. As you know, I’ve always been a bit impulsive.

Looking forward to reading what name you’ll give me, Mr. Art Barbara.