The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay (Offbeat Horror Novel, 2022).
I only recently came across this book at my local library and at first I had doubts about its daring (not to mention outre) format. But Tremblay’s writing won me over and I found this a very successful variation on psychic vampire tropes. This book is styled as the memoir of the main viewpoint character, using the pseudonym Art Barbara. An angst-ridden teenager, he’s at once fearful of yet drawn to a fellow punk-rock enthusiast, whom he calls Mercy. Armed with her trusty Polaroid and an overpowering attitude in her self-proclaimed quest for proof that vampires are real, she storms into his life when Art forms the unlikely title club. It’s allegedly to win extracurricular credits for colleges he’ll (in the end) never attend. Or maybe it’s his last-gasp lonely outcast teen effort to find himself a friend.
Together, they begin volunteering as pallbearers at funerals for the homeless, the abandoned and the forgotten–poor, dead souls nobody else could be bothered to pay their respects for. Art is an admittedly weird kid, who grows into a middling local musician bouncing around the bar/club scenes in New England. Mercy has shifted in and out of his life over the years, their friendship strained and stressed, yet never completely broken.
He becomes convinced that Mercy is, indeed, a sort of vampire–sucking the life force from him and others as they sleep. Yet he can’t bring himself to permanently expel her from his life. And finally, he imagines he’s become one too! Guilt, anger and recriminations blend with unspoken desires as the novel unfolds across the decades.
She denies it all, of course. But when he’s on the verge of completing his tortured (yet mostly entertainingly written) memoir (which she insists is fiction, hence a novel), he asks Mercy to serve as a first reader. She does, commenting throughout the book, especially with detailed hand-written postscripts to each chapter (in red ink, no less).
So the book is largely a he said/she said conversation about their entangled, peculiar and yet sometimes funny and often touching lives. To the very end (of both Art’s book and his life), Mercy denies most of his claims. Yet it’s her final words and actions that bring the book to a dramatic, suitably weird yet satisfying and even touching conclusion.
Is she/are they actual vampires–maybe connected to one or more legendary figures/victims of the New England vampire panics of past eras? Hey, read the book for yourself to be sure!
Some of Art’s persona includes a bit of whiny overwriting, but stick with it and you’ll have a rewarding read. This is, indeed, an offbeat–and yet a truly fine and creepy novel.
jimleeauthor 