“Real life works that way, but not stories, not novels. Not the ones we want to read anyway. Novels are lies. Great, big, wonderful lies.”

After shoveling book after book by this author into my gluttonous eyeballs, I knew eventually I would come across one that I just couldn’t connect with. I’m not mad and I will continue to search out any and all Tremblay I can get my greedy hands on; I’m not a traitorous reader and I will never hang up my “No. 1 Paul Tremblay Fan-Man” hat.

This was a good book. It has everything I need from a good book: witty prose, solid length, big descriptive writing to really get me in the trenches. Tremblay is a character creation and setting building master and “Pallbearers” is proof again. Like “A Head Full Of Ghosts,” we don’t know anything but what we’re told, and that reality is where suspense lives in these pages.

I think the split narration/marginalia created a ping-pong effect that took a lot of the WHAM out of the ending, which I genuinely adored. The back and forth, conversation concept is largely endearing, however I found it added to some confusion build up where the narration was already hyperbolic. The spectrum of self-effacing vs. masturbatory narration was a difficult terrain to navigate and ended up being the facet I couldn’t make friends with.

3/5 I would recommend other Tremblays to start, but I wouldn’t knock this off the list entirely.