For his latest novel, “The Pallbearers Club,” dizzily ascending horror writer Paul Tremblay found himself juggling numerous tangents and constructs in his effort to make it all work.

Fortunately, he’s really good at this stuff.

As the author of the metafictionally fantastic “A Headful of Ghosts,” the prescient pandemic novel “Survivor Song” and the suffocating “The Cabin at the End of the World” – soon to be a film from M. Night Shyamalan – Tremblay has gained a well-deserved reputation for wonderfully expanding the possibilities of horror fiction.

Ditto for “The Pallbearers Club,” a wonderful, sad, funny and frightening story that (sort of) contains its own punk rock soundtrack, “handwritten” notes in the margins and, if we’re honest about it, more than a few metaphorical flashbacks to Tremblay’s own conflicted teenage years.

The main premise of “The Pallbearers Club” is that we’re reading an unpublished memoir written by a Massachusetts/Rhode Island man named Art Barbara. Or the author claims to be Art Barbara. To add to the complexity, that we can see the manuscript at all is because the memoir was found by Art’s oldest friend, Mercy Brown.

In any case, having discovered the manuscript, Mercy naturally wants to read Art’s memoir – and she turns out to be a major character in his reflections. The problem is, Mercy has a LOT of issues with the accuracy, implications and conclusions of Art’s pages – and takes it upon herself to scribble corrections and observations in the margins. At times, she’s sufficiently wound up that she counters Art’s typewritten chapters with several strategically inserted pages of her own handwritten notes.

Readers see all of this.

Define friendship

The tension and “back-and-forth” perspective work terrifically and, as much as Mercy is witty, playful and astute – an easy character to enjoy – the reader gradually comes to question exactly how good a “friend” she really is/was to Art. At the same time, it’s clear that she also saved him from himself in many ways and in fact provided new opportunities for his creative expression and evolving self-image.

“I liked the idea of a found memoir. And that Mercy found it was exciting because she was not going to be able to resist providing her input on Art’s version of events,” Tremblay says by phone from his home outside Boston last week. Now 51, Tremblay is married with two children – one in college and the other about to be – and he still teaches high school math although he’s taking a sabbatical next year to finish some contracted books.

This day, he’s excited and a bit nervous about an impending publicity junket in Spain – that “baño” means bathroom in Spanish is, he says, the extent of his fluency in that regard – and then returns to the States for more events, including a stop Thursday at Bank Square Books in Mystic for the latest in our “Read of The Day” book club.

The memoir starts in the late 1980s and bounces back and forth between then and the present. It describes Art’s life starting in high school, when, as an awkward kid embarrassed and challenged by severe scoliosis, he takes solace in bands like Scorpions and Def Leppard. A loner, he also hopes to enhance the bleak “extracurricular activities” part of his college applications and comes up with the idea of the titular organization – where he and club members will provide funerary assistance for folks who have died leaving no family or friends to help on that final, casket-hefting path from the hearse to the grave.

Looking in the rearview mirror

“In one way, Art is an alternate reality to my life,” Tremblay says, “but this is NOT an autobiographical book. Drifting off into one’s own past can be dangerous as a novelist.” He laughs. “I write in a very personal way to begin with, but in this case the manuscript got pretty bloated, and I lost a lot of perspective. I ended up having to cut about 30 pages that wouldn’t have made any sense to the reader.

“At the same time, I think it was useful to think about things that were important in high school. Like Art, I had scoliosis and had to sleep with a painful back brace. That has an effect on your self-confidence and self-identity. I also thought about things like why you choose to write or why do you listen to music and what kind of music do you listen to?”

Pallbearer sounds

Music indeed comes into play in the novel. Mercy, a few years older than Art and not a high school classmate, joins the Pallbearers Club and, with her confident and colorful punk rock/rebel persona, pulls Art out of his shell and introduces him to new possibilities and aesthetics. Ultimately, largely because of Mercy’s influence, Art forges his own musician’s path as a member in a succession of minimally successful Providence area punk bands.

And while Tremblay’s original attempts to learn guitar and form a punk band were eventually thwarted by his desire to write fiction, there is a companion-piece, four-song “Pallbearer’s Club” recording of Tremblay’s early musical efforts available at www.thepallbearersclub/bandcamp.com. Too, each chapter in the novel is titled with the name of a Hüsker Dü song; the band is the author’s favorite and its leader, Bob Mould, now a solo artist, is someone Tremblay has seen in concert at least 30 times.

“I definitely want and need music in my life,” Tremblay says. “In some ways, this book was a way to write about my favorite music. Music serves the function of allowing me to shut my brain off and I wanted to be a rock star. I thought that was a fantastic life to have. I tried to do it, but to my chagrin I’m a better writer.”

It’s got teeth

But Mercy’s influence on Art’s life extends beyond just tunes and attitude. As per her membership in the pallbearers club, her fascination with the dead – she loves taking photos of the open-casket funerals they attend – both disturbs and intrigues Art.

He also comes to suspect she … might be a vampire.

Intriguingly – if you know your Rhody folklore (and you can look it up) – there was an apocryphal Exeter vampire named, ah, Mercy Brown in the late 1890s, and she typified a distinctive Ocean State breed of vampires who survive by stealing a victim’s essence rather than drinking their blood. In the book, it’s not the same Mercy Brown. Or is it?

This history and its overlapping developments – coincidences? – play crucial parts in the narrative, even after Art’s and Mercy’s relationship has deteriorated and they go years without seeing one another. Why and how Mercy reenters Art’s life – and the circumstances in which she comes to find his memoir represent the climax of the story.

“The Pallbearers Club” is a complex and multi-structured effort but, rather than being difficult to follow or archly clever for the sake of it, it’s a wonderful book – which is perhaps not an adjective often used to describe horror fiction.

“I hoped the funny parts would be funny; the creepy parts creepy and the sad parts sad,” Trembly says. “The idea that horror can’t be funny is wrong, I think. There’s a close connection. One of my favorite films is ‘Evil Dead 2,’ which is both scary as hell and very funny. That’s the tone I wanted, and I think, particularly in these times, people can appreciate.”

It’s called fame

In addition to the current book tour – and the fact that reviews for “The Pallbearers Club” have been uniformly exultant, Tremblay is now dealing with the just-announced news about “Knock at the Cain,” Shyamalan’s film version of “The Cabin at the End of the World.” It’s a good problem to have.

When asked what it’s like to have M. Night Shyaman call and express interest in making a movie about one of his books, Tremblay says, “Well, he didn’t actually call me. The book had been optioned for a while, and you hear rumors and stuff and most of the time nothing happens.

“In this case, it did – and it’s the guy who made ‘The Sixth Sense’! It’s surreal,” Tremblay says. “I was actually on set for a few days, and it was amazing. Everyone was incredibly nice. The only way I could deal with it was to keep telling myself he was just another person I’m dealing with professionally – and then it would sink in again and I’d go, ‘Holy crap! It’s M. Night Shyamalan! He made “The Sixth Sense”!’”

SIDEBAR

One of the hurdles Tremblay had to face in writing “The Pallbearers Club” was the issue of layout and typography. To make sense, Mercy Brown’s handwritten scribblings and notes had to largely take place in the margins – something not typically dealt with in standard book design.

“I didn’t talk one on one with the designer,” Tremblay says, “but I’d warned my editor for a long time about the dynamics. There was some pushback, but in the end they knocked it out of the park and it added so much to the overall presentation of the story and the beauty of the book.”

For his part, Tremblay says he wasn’t thinking about the long-term lifespan of the book, or whether people would even be able to read longhand 20 years from now. At the same time, he didn’t want Mercy’s manufactured handwriting to be hard to read, so he himself searched the internet for a font that would convey her penmanship but still be legible. A few minutes after the phone interview for this story ended, Tremblay sent an email saying he’d found the font he’d originally suggested to the design team. “Kalam Light is what I used,” he writes. “The font in the book is a bit different, more handwriting-y. But it was the general idea.”

If you go

Who: Horror writer Paul Tremblay, author of “The Pallbearers Club”

What: Discusses his new book “The Pallbearers Club” with Rick Koster for our “Read of The Day” author series in partnership with Bank Square Books

When: 7 p.m. Thursday

Where: Bank Square Books, 53 West Main St., Mystic

How much: Free, copies of “The Pallbearers Club” available for $27.99

For more information: www.banksquarebooks.com, (860) 536-3795