Seven dark tales haunted by music

Kate van der Borgh's new novel is And He Shall Appear. By day, the author is a freelance copywriter, and by night, she’s usually composing or playing music. She grew up in Lancashire and went on to study music at Cambridge, so there’s a reasonable amount of her in her narrator—including the fact that she was a pianist and reluctant bassoonist. She has, however, never had reason to suspect that her best friend has occult powers.

At Electric Lit van der Borgh tagged seven "novels in which music is used to communicate indescribable emotions and inexplicable experiences." One title on the list:

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

In this ‘memoir’, a man recalls an unsettling friendship from his youth. And, from the first page, you know the story won’t be straightforward. Its narrator, Art Barbara, bears a striking resemblance to the author Paul Tremblay himself, not least in their shared love of punk band Hüsker Dü. And the friend Art has written about—a woman named Mercy—has made notes in the margins of this memoir, contesting Art’s view of what happened all those years ago. At the heart of the work is a question: in this toxic friendship, was Mercy an emotional vampire? Or something worse?

This is a story about yearning for lost youth and all the potential that came with it. And, by filling it with Art’s favourite bands—Talking Heads, Ramones, Dead Kennedys, Patti Smith—Tremblay manages to underscore all the fear and dread with an exquisitely painful nostalgia. Eerie, funny, and ultimately extremely moving, this for me is Tremblay at his best.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue