And walk it you do. Because even though there is much darkness, this may be your first genuinely funny book. we are all someone's monster, but we don't always get the chance to see our monstrous selves through someone else's eyes, and we don't always get a chance to apologize for what we've done.

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 Nabokov's Pale Fire." — Sarah Langan, author of Good Neighbors BOND: And thinking about that, this book is very much located in the late '80s. It's a very Gen-X story, right? I started with the notion that Art would represent me on a different life path. What would have happened, for instance, if I’d dropped out of college to play in punk bands? I always tend to start with some autobiographical question like that, and then I see where it goes. Of course, I’ve leaned into it much more heavily with this book. Striking the balance was the biggest challenge of the book by far. There were things that I wrote that seemed really clever, but then I had to tell myself, “Paul, no one will get this reference about that thing that happened that one time when you were fifteen.” In the end, it was broader stuff like music and family. Art has a very interesting relationship with his parents in this book, and a lot of that is drawn from my own high school years. Co-publishers Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi announced a new imprint for Chi The YA imprint of the dark fiction press ChiZine Publications Mercy seeing one of Art’s fliers about the club decides to join. Mercy was a bit older and in Jr. College, constantly smoked weed, and was way cooler than Art but she seemed to like him and thought the club was interesting. But she had an odd habit of bringing her Polaroid Camera with her and took lots of pictures of the dead. She also knew a bit a freaky folklore that involved digging up the dead.Next year I’m publishing another short story collection. It’s called The Beast You Are, and because I so obviously know what the mainstream reading public wants, the title story is a 30,000-word anthropomorphic animal novella that features a giant monster and a cat that’s a slasher… oh, and it’s also written in free-verse. Well, I'm 51 years old now. It's been a long time since I did this, but: This book is a piece of shit. Books can have teeth. A whole mouthful of them. The Pallbearers Club has a whole lifetime of them." — Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of My Heart Is a Chainsaw

Actually, I feel like a lot of my books have taken on tropes head-on. A Head Full of Ghosts dealt with possession; Survivor Song is a zombie-adjacent novel. I just try different ways to approach them. For years, my friend [and fellow horror writer] John Langan has been asking me when I’m going to write my vampire novel, but I had no ideas. Then I discovered the legend surrounding Mercy Brown, this supposed vampire from New England folklore. I hadn’t heard of her until a very few years ago, but the legend does seem to have become more popular in the last decade. I also just did not buy all the supernatural stuff. The Mercy commentary is fantastic, and what this book does quite well is leave you with a question of "did this really happen?" Is Art making all this up? Or is Mercy covering up secrets she doesn't want anyone to know? The ambiguity walks a fine line, but it walks it very well. It walks it so well that I wish the rest of the book had more there there! The supernatural stuff was never really scary, I found it confusing more often than not. their friendship changed his life, but the precise nature of that change is the crux of this he said/she said account; a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-unreliable-narrator that depends on whether you believe art, who insists on referring to his book as a memoir, or mercy, who is equally insistent on reclassifying it as a novel. Mercy like Art was unique. She took pictures of corpses and knew a lot about other strange things. The two became fast friends. There is an element of biography, then? The book opens with the narrator admitting that he is not who he claims to be. Is that because he is actually you?Mercy finds the Memoir, which she insists is actually fiction and nothing more than a novel, and corrects where she sees fit. Adding her own details to what she feels Art got wrong. So the reader gets to hear a lot of her narrative on certain parts of the books. Rating 10: Loved it so much. Mixing humor, horror, and a whole lot of pathos, “The Pallbearers Club” is Tremblay’s best work.

a gangly, scoliosis-stooped loner, art was immediately drawn to the enigmatic and effortlessly cool mercy, who became his virgil into pot, punk music, and the wonders of providence, both its contemporary (for them) club scene and its eerie historical legends, like the one about mercy brown, a notable woman whose story is known to all of little rhody's babygoths. through these comments, which alternate between teasing and confrontational, we get two very different perspectives of the central characters and their motives, and some insight into the dynamics of their relationship—a platonic m/f friendship whose central question is not the cheeky "will they or won't they?" but the ominous "is she or isn't she?," and the dark suspicions art has been nursing for years about mercy and her effect on his life (and her furniture) shifts the narrative into spooky, uncanny territory. I am losing you and the loss is aching and delicious and bottomless and as addictive as the gain, as the replacing. clearly, there's a lot going on in tremblay's latest, and ain't none of it easy to summarize intelligibly in a little book report (i do not envy anyone tasked with BISAC-ing this one), but let's give it a shot... Seamlessly blurring the lines between fiction and memory, the supernatural and the mundane, The Pallbearers Club is an immersive, suspenseful portrait of an unusual and disconcerting relationship. Critical Praise

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Co-publishers Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi announced a new imprint for ChiZine Publications (CZP) to focus on Young Adult fiction. Called “ChiTeen,” the first title will be The Unlikely But Totally True Adventures of Floating Boy and Anxiety Girl by Paul Tremblay and Stephen Graham Jones, scheduled for release in spring 2014. TREMBLAY: Yeah. You know, I was a - math was always my best subject, so I didn't really - in a - as a high school student - or even in undergraduate, I was a math major, I didn't stray too far from that. But when I discovered King, I was like, oh, these aren't, like, dusty stories and gothic halls and things like that - you know, the stuff I had - I was forced to read when I was taking English classes. He's writing about, like, my dad, who worked in a factory for 25 years. And he's writing about my mom, who was a bank teller. So to me, that was, like, instant credibility, for me, as a reader, was seeing, oh, here are people, at least at that point in time, I hadn't actually really seen represented in the fiction that I was certainly taught. The horror of the self, I think. All of my books have been interested in that, I think. I’m fascinated by the ambiguity of our inner spaces: memory and identity and even reality itself. I think all of those are wrapped up in The Pallbearers Club, because even though Art spends so much time—basically the entire book—writing about himself, he remains a mystery to himself. I think there is both horror and humor in that realization. That’s the thin line that I was trying to walk. Years later in an attempt to make sense of events that occurred, Art writes the Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. This is where I continue to ask you questions and you continue to skillfully parry them, but what is it like to have your story in someone else’s hands?

Books can have teeth. A whole mouthful of them. The Pallbearers Clubhas a whole lifetime of them."— Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of My Heart is a Chainsaw

Any new book by Paul Tremblay makes me sit up straight. Part of the joy is not knowing what to expect from each new story.”— Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual and No One Gets Out Alive STAR review in the April 15 issue of Bookliots and on the blog: https://raforall.blogspot.com/2022/04...