Tag: 3 stars

When her parents die suddenly, Louise returns to her childhood home in Charleston. She and her brother, Mark, haven’t spoken in three years. Together they’re going to be confronted by the past, along with a house overflowing with their mother’s ‘art’.

“I don’t think we’re weirder than any other family,” she said.

“Trust me,” Constance said. “You guys definitely are.”

With family secrets, the power of belief, creepy dolls and a puppet with abandonment issues, this case would be right up Sam and Dean Winchester’s alley.

I’ve seen every Child’s Play movie and enjoyed watching Ed and Lorraine Warren deal with the carnage Annabelle left in her wake. I was just a tad obsessed with The Final Girl Support Group. With all of that in mind, I was ready to fall in love with this book and was looking forward to being creeped out by it, but unfortunately it fell a bit flat for me.

Despite wanting to believe, I never did, and that took a lot of the fun out of Pupkin’s antics for me. Instead, I found him and his sing songy delight at causing chaos irritating. I liked Mark some of the time but never warmed to Louise. Aunt Honey, who managed to snag most of the good lines early on, didn’t have as much page time as I’d hoped.

I loved the funeral scene. I’m still craving some Pizza Chinese. If I didn’t find Pupkin so annoying I probably would have been able to suspend my disbelief and get caught up in the mayhem, but I couldn’t escape him.

Because my love of The Final Girl Support Group is so big, I’m going to call my experience with this book an aberration and look forward to falling in love with my next Grady Hendrix read.

Favourite no context quote:

“You’re like some kind of emotionally abusive octopus entangling everyone in your word tentacles.”

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Titan Books for the opportunity to read this book.

Once Upon a Blurb

When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world.

Mostly, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. But she’ll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it’ll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market.

Some houses don’t want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them…

I’ve loved the Paul Tremblay books I’ve previously read and the blurb for this one had me intrigued, so it’s safe to say this was a highly anticipated read for me. It’s clear from the reviews I’ve read prior to its publication that this is going to be a divisive read and I’m sad to say that on this occasion I’m not on the side of the divide that I was hoping I would be. 

Art Barbara (not his real name) and Mercy Brown (this may or may not be her real name but it’s up to you to decide) meet at a funeral. Art, who needed an extracurricular activity for his college applications, created the Pallbearers Club. Mercy, a stranger of indeterminate age, joins and the two become friends people who spend time with one another … I don’t know how to describe their relationship. 

It’s all kind of odd. Art thinks Mercy is a vampire and proceeds to write a memoir where he attributes various occurrences in his life to said vampirism. Mercy reads the manuscript of Art’s memoir, calls it fiction and then annotates it. 

Art uses foreshadowing like it’s going out of fashion, makes nouns into verbs (I’m good with that) and writes sentences that last an entire paragraph. 

A chapter in which, frankly, I don’t know the best way to somewhat briefly yet dramatically convey and/or describe the passing of twenty years, of the invisible years, and after considerable consideration I land upon using deftly placed flashbacks (to be presented as unrealistic interview dialogue) despite knowing said flashbacks are frowned upon (with, admittedly, good reason most of the time) by the academia writing syndicate as well as by those who can afford to pay for the privilege of being taught prescriptive writing advice, but fuck it, a memoir Novel! is all flashback anyway, so we’ll all just have to deal, and there’s a messed-up and scary piece of furniture that should’ve been a clue. 

I’d encourage you to read some 5 star reviews because there are readers who loved this book as much as I wish I did. Even though this one didn’t work for me, I’m keen to read the rest of this author’s books. 

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Titan Books for the opportunity to read this book.

Once Upon a Blurb

1988, 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.

Decades later, Art is writing his memoir to try and make sense of it all, because nothing about Mercy is simple. It’s all a matter of trust, right? Their friendship twists and coils around the pair of them, captured in Polaroid snapshots and sweaty gigs and the freaky, inexplicable flashes of nightmare that lurk in a folded jacket at night.

Because Art is writing his memoir to make sense of it all, but Mercy is reading it too. Mercy thinks Art’s novel – because this isn’t a memoir – needs some work, and she’s more than happy to set the record straight. What if Art didn’t get everything right? Come on, Art, you can’t tell just one side of the story… 

Seamlessly blurring the lines between fiction and memory, the supernatural and the mundane, The Pallbearers Club is an immersive, suspenseful portrait of an unforgettable and unsettling friendship.