I was going to emerge from the surgery physically transformed. Maybe not quite a butterfly poking through a chrysalis, but my kyphotic, cowering body would be radically altered/reconstructed by this time tomorrow. It might not be enough (it would never be enough), but I hoped it might be. Well, who isn’t obsessed with truth? Especially in this age of misinformation when you have to invest so much more work into identifying what is true. But it’s also an issue of character. As a reader, I’m far more interested in fallible characters who make terrible mistakes and the decisions that led to those mistakes—decisions that were based on whatever information they had at the time. That’s the human part of fiction. It’s the human part of being human. That’s why I have a fondness for what I call the first-person asshole narrator. The kind of narrator who is not very good, but they are still trying. Books like William Kennedy Tool’s A Confederacy of Dunces. That kind of narrator tests my empathy, and my ability to connect with characters who are unsavory, or who make poor decisions. 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... Decades later, Art tries to make sense of it all by writing The Pallbearers’ Club: A Memoir. But somehow this friend got her hands on the manuscript and, well, she has some issues with it. And now she’s making cuts.

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.

But do we? It’s as if you have written this book specifically to deny us the truth, with Mercy deconstructing and undermining Art’s memoir from the margins.

A horror? A thriller? A vampire story or just one about our mortal condition and friendship? I'll let you decide, because I do not know the answer and I'm happy with that. Grief, stories of the pandemic, monsters and childhood fears are among the themes in this collection of short stories from author Paul Tremblay. Tremblay is one of my favorite authors and I jumped at the chance to read this ARC. I really enjoyed the author's previous collection "Growing Things" and didn't enjoy this quite as much, but there are still some gems here worth reading. There are several short stories, some very short flash fiction pieces and a novella titled "The Beast You Are" which finishes the collection. A few notes on my favorites from the collection:I think for long-time Tremblay fans, this will be an enjoyable way to get your hands on so many of his shorter works. I would absolutely recommend it to those readers looking to get easy access to that type of story. The "story" revolves around Art Barbara, a social outcast High Schooler who suffers from Scoliosis.

Decades later, Art tries to make sense of it all by writing The Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. But somehow this friend got her hands on the manuscript and, well, she has some issues with it. And now she's making cuts. and puberty has hit Art Barbara hard - he’s a painfully socially awkward teenager, underweight, acne-ridden, and bent crooked by scoliosis. Worse, he has no extra credits to get him into college. So Art starts the Pallbearers’ Club, dedicated to mourning the homeless and lonely – the people with no one else to bury them. It might be a small club, unpopular and morbid, but it introduces Art to Mercy Brown, who is into bands, local history, folklore and digging up the dead. Here is an example of a note I took: This book is Tremblay's take on coming of age, small town horror first made popular by Stephen King, but like he did for the "Exorcism" novel in A Head Full of Ghosts, he has taken on a tried and true trope as his foundation and transformed it into something so new and original, that it elevates the entire genre as a result. that is a good example of art's prose-stylings; dripping with self-deprecation, laden with ominous foreshadowing and unnecessarily grandiose language, and mercy's more lively, conversational voice is a breath of fresh air as she rewrites his-story, often better, and certainly less self-consciously, than his own version of events.

Paul Tremblay

The Dead Thing," my overall favorite, in which Tremblay explores the far-reaching impacts of childhood trauma. It was incredibly creepy and emotionally resonant, but unfortunately this is one of those that ended way too abruptly. Nothing happens. Ever. There is NO STORY, just self-indulgent memory porn and two self-obsessed dud characters. I loved how a couple of the stories are lightly connected to A Head Full of Ghosts. That was fun, like little Easter Eggs.