A review by jencunn2024
The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

2.0

I’m on the precipice of a mixed review. This book was fantastic at the beginning with all the pop and punk culture references for Gen-Xers. The characters are fun and interesting and full of quick-witted banter. I especially loved the dual/duel narrator format with the Art Barbara protagonist and his co-editing friend Mercy Brown. It was fun having both voices in this format. The ending was pretty good too. But somewhere in the middle Paul Tremblay lost my complete interest, especially with Art’s character. It turns into repetitive drone and boring gloom that goes not much of anywhere for about 100 pages or more. This is an alternate historical fiction, a vampire story. It was a great idea for a novel/memoir but the execution was stifling. The mystery was dull and there was almost zero character development. I just wanted this to be so much more and felt robbed by about halfway through and kept giving the author the benefit of doubt to get through to the end, which was almost worth it but didn’t quite get it for me. Tremblay also had a tendency to overuse words like precipice and common phrases such as “To wit…” which eventually made my skin crawl. All puns and sarcasm in my review are intended as it was for his characters. One other problem he should look out for in future endeavors is giving two different narrators almost the same voice; even though there were different personalities here, that did not play through between the narrators’ voices.