There are two types of Paul Tremblay readers: the ones who like Paul Tremblay, and the ones who hate Paul Tremblay but seem to read everything he publishes, anyway, for the sole purpose of going online and telling people that everything he writes is shit.

I'm one of the first group, and tend to wonder if the second group might find better uses of their time reading books that they actually, you know, enjoy; and so, I had a good time reading The Pallbearers Club. It's best to go into this one with as little information as possible, so I won't detail the specifics of the creepy-crawliness at play. But I will say that it's a good hard look at the pitfalls of being mired in one's past, and an intellectually playful exercise in voice. Sections read as almost unbearably pretentious and try-hard, which is of course the point and very well executed, and I can't tell you how much amusement I got from the moments when I thought, "I don't know if I would've made that choice as a writer, Paul/Art, it seems a bit goofy" only to have Mercy's annotations critique the same exact thing.

This is not the book for you if you don't like character-driven books that build slowly to ambiguous conclusions, nor if you're the kind of reader who thinks that an author's inclusion of words you don't know means that their writing is "masturbatory." You won't like this book if you don't like horror that doesn't sit smack dab in the middle of the genre. Or if you don't like long paragraphs or long chapters (both of which are real criticisms that people have had in front of my own two hapless eyes). But, friends, these are things that all Paul Tremblay books do, and this is not his first one by a long shot, so you should know better by now! Just read another book!