The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

Brilliant! This book lured me in with familiarity, I live in South Carolina, I've vacationed in Charleston and Moncks Corner. I've met every single character from this book at one time or another and they are all spot on.

Throughout a lot of this book I was infuriated by how these people were treating this situation. I know not all married people have the same relationship, but if my wife ever told me she saw something like Patricia saw I would be sharpening the machete and trying to get Sam and Dean Winchester to take my call.

Speaking of my true crime obsessed wife, all of the books read throughout the novel are now my required reading. We read this together and she was appalled at my ignorance of these books and the stories of these show more killers.

So thanks for a perfect novel Mr. Hendrix. True to life characters are rare in horror sometimes, but I knew these women and I've been pissed off at these men in my day to day life. So now I have to go see if they have Helter Skelter or In Cold Blood at my library. show less

When it comes to monsters, vampires and ghouls, my expectations and enjoyment tend to hover around the fairly ambivalent.

But I can happily say that this book defied my expectations of silly, campy maneuvres often employed by horror story writers and instead gave me a wry smile at its conclusion.

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is a fresh, witty, satire-laden story that starts out innocently enough. And then — boom! out of nowhere — someone’s earlobe is bitten off.

However, the biggest monster in the story isn't the vampire.

HOLY CHRIST! Ok finished this like 5 minutes ago and just...WOW. This was a lot more hardcore than I was expecting. I expected this to be a light hearted mystery/horror and what I got was a more hardcore horror story than I have read in quite a few years. It was written incredibly well, very visceral but in a good way. I would absolutely recommend this to a horror fiction lover but not anyone else. There is just too much in here (racial themes, physical violence, domestic abuse, emotional/mental abuse, child violence, rape, etc) for anyone but a devoted horror literary fan to enjoy. Even I was quite taken aback by it and had to put the book down.

From the title, I assumed 'The Southern Book Club's Guide To Slaying Vampires' would be a soft, fluffy story. Boy was I wrong about that.

To be fair to myself, while my reading before Grady Hendrix had told me that vampires, (except for the sparkly vegetarian ones) were scary predators, it had also told me that they'd be kept in check by:
A Vampire Council committed to maintaining secrecy
Other supernats committed to maintaining secrecy
'Have Stakes. Will Travel' vampire hunters for hire
A teenage girl with exceptional martial arts skills and a devoted set of friends

So I tended not to worry about them too much.

Grady Hendrix rejects all of that, His vampire is a lone, ungoverned, insatiable predator who won't be stopped except by desperate, show more ordinary people who have nothing to lose and it won't be easy.

One of the things that will make it difficult is that ordinary people like you and me, we don't really believe in vampires any more than we believe in Tinkerbell.

Hendrix poses the question, 'How do you fight what you believe isn't real?'

Part of the answer to that question is likely to be 'Alone', because who's going to believe you?

Except maybe the women you meet every week at a book club devoted to discussing serial killers?

This way of looking at vampires makes them a lot more threatening.

At the start of the book, I assumed, wrongly, that all that was needed was for the women to form their own Scooby-gang and the vampire would be done for. At that point, the vampire seemed menacing but no more than that. Once he was unmasked, what harm could he do?

Grady Hendrix didn't make it that easy.

I raised my threat assessment level when the vampire sent killer rats to swarm helpless women in their own homes but I didn't really understand what I was dealing with until two of the middle-class white women from the book club went to visit the home of the black nurse who was hurt in that attack. While they were waiting to be let in they heard little girls singing a skipping song about the Boo Daddy who is coming at night to steal children. The matter-of-fact tone of that song and the internalised fear it represented was more chilling than the rats.

I knew then that Hendrix wasn't just talking about vampires here, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the vampire isn't just a vampire. The vampire is an evil that lurks beneath the surface of our society but that we don't talk about.

I think the Boo Daddy that the children sing about and that the adults put effort into not seeing, represents the white male predators who move unpunished through our world because we don't believe that racial hatred, misogyny, and twisted lust will really rip away the lives and happiness of the people we love. We tell ourselves that ours is not a culture that condones rape and abuse and killing, even though all the numbers tell us a different story.

Hendrix's vampire is an embodiment of insatiable male greed. He's charming and charismatic, has the knack of making the men around him want to follow him and feel better about themselves for doing so, even as he takes every opportunity, politely and with a smile, to undermine, demean, mock and threaten their wives. He is a corrupter, a sower of discord, a parasite.

Hendrix's vampire isn't some stuffy Transilvanian Count pining for his glory days, he is 100% Pure American Prime Raggedy Man. He's the hustle that has always sold the American dream without ever delivering it.

Men don't come out of this story well. For me, one of the most disturbing scenes in the book was where the husbands of the women in the book club behave (entirely believably, I'm afraid) like a group of pompous, patronising, patriarchal pricks, treating their assembled wives like children needing correction from wiser heads. This scene made me think that the women should make the suspected vampire a second priority and come together to devise a way of teaching their husbands the need to respect the women they're married to. Except, most of the ways I could immediately think of to do that would have turned the women into widows.

It's that mix of fury and impotence that sets the tone of this story.

What I liked most about the story was its message that knowing the vampire is there, knowing who he is and what he does, isn't enough to defeat him or even to convince the people who love you to help you because this vampire has seduced not the women but the men. He's turned them into the worst version of themselves and used them as a rod to impose his authority. Any woman who stands against him risks losing everything and with no guarantee of success.

Look around the world today. The vampires are there in plain sight shielded by men who admire them and who are willing to look the other way while they prey on the weak.

I think Hendrix is telling us that the only way to stop these predatory white men is for ordinary women, the mothers who protect all of us, to acknowledge the existence of the Boo Daddy and work together to rip out its heart. He's also telling us that that kind of thing has a price that has to be paid for in blood, lots of blood, some of it your own.

I recommend the audiobook version which is perfectly delivered by Bahni Turpin. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.
https://soundcloud.com/audiolibrary-a/the-southern-book-clubs-guide-to-slaying-v... show less

Because vampires are the original serial killers, stripped of everything that makes us human--they have no friends, no family, no roots, no children. All they have is hunger. They eat and eat but they're never full. With this book, I wanted to pit a man freed from all responsibilities but his appetites against women whose lives are shaped by their endless responsibilities. I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom.
As you'll see, it's not a fair fight.

Had this been my first Grady Hendrix novel, I might have rated it higher. (As is, I still liked it.) [b:Horrorstör|13129925|Horrorstör|Grady Hendrix|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414314217l/13129925._SX50_.jpg|18306052] (AKA Haunted IKEA) and [b:My show more Best Friend's Exorcism|41015038|My Best Friend's Exorcism|Grady Hendrix|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1533059241l/41015038._SY75_.jpg|46065002] ("Beaches meets The Exorcist") were great -- uniquely blending horror and camp and humor with fantastic writing -- but [b:We Sold Our Souls|37715859|We Sold Our Souls|Grady Hendrix|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1527975643l/37715859._SY75_.jpg|59355324] blew me away.

In comparison, this one was...a little sleepy, a little restrained. Obviously, a lot of that has to do with the characters: southern suburban housewives concerned with doing everything just right. There's some (stereotypical) variation in the group: the religious zealot (Slick), the northern liberal (Maryellen), the uptight perfectionist (Grace), and her opposite (Kitty) -- the larger-than-life loudmouth. And then there's our main character, Patricia. She's lost, going through the motions, wondering how she got where she is. At least she has her friends, her not-a-book-club, where the women spice up their dull lives reading true crime novels (although they occasionally try to add some more literary options).

Then a stranger moves to town and weird shit starts happening. After being attacked by his elderly great-aunt, Patricia's life becomes entangled with the stranger, James Harris. She finds herself helping him and even inviting him to her not-a-book-club.

"Didn't y'all just love The Bridges of Madison County?" [Slick] asked. "I thought it was such a relief after last month. Just a good old-fashioned love story between a woman and a man."
"Who is clearly a serial killer," Kitty said, keeping her eyes on James Harris.
"I think the world is changing so quickly that people need a hopeful story," Slick said.
"About a lunatic who travels from town to town seducing women, then killing them," Kitty said.
"Well," Slick said. Thrown, she looked down at her notes and cleared her throat again. "We chose this book because it speaks about the powerful attraction that can exist between two strangers."
"We chose this book so you'd stop going on about it," Maryellen said.
"I don't think there's any actual evidence he's actually a serial killer," Slick said.
Kitty picked up her copy, bristling with bright pink Post-it notes, and waggled it in the air.

After Kitty's exposition, which basically describes James Harris to a T, one of the other members turns to him:

"What about you, James Harris?" Maryellen asked. "I've never met a man who doesn't have an opinion: is Robert Kincaid a romantic American icon or a drifter who murders women?"
James Harris flashed a bashful grin.
"Clearly I read a very different book from you ladies," he said. "But I'm learning a lot here tonight. Carry on."

Mr. Hendrix clearly has fun juxtaposing the women's proper lives and conversations with squirm-inducing horror tropes the marsh rats! everything in that freaking attic! and whatever the fuck comes out of Harris's throat! , which makes for some cringey, but entertaining reading. What I didn't love is all the social constraints, which took up waaaaay too much of the book for my taste. Y'all, I would not cut it as a proper southern lady. I wanted to murder a lot more people than just the damn vampire. show less

I've read this book before but with Halloween just around the corner I thought it would be a great time to revisit an old favorite.

We have a group of Charleston South Carolina women who are about to get more than they bargained for. Patricia Campbell’s life has so far been fairly normal other than her habit of just showing up to the book club meeting. She seldom, if ever actually reads any of the books, but she's there for the club members and especially, the juicy gossip. Patricia says that It’s hard to get any reading done between raising her two kids, Blue and Korey...picking up after her husband, Carter, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, "Miss Mary", who probably has dementia.

It doesn’t help that the books chosen show more are just plain.... boring; that's "boring" with a capital "B". Then Kitty, another book club member, gives Patricia a gloriously, sexy, hot, juicy, trashy, true-crime, romance novel and Patricia is instantly and completely hooked and no longer quiet so bored. Now she’s attending a very different kind of book club meeting with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Mary Ellen. Stuff piling up at home has lost all its previous importance.

Patricia loves these new friends but still is longing for a bit more excitement in her life. I thought, she should be very careful what she wishes for, as she just might get it... and more. Of course, her wish is granted...and James Harris soon moves in on her street. The women are all intrigued. Boy...are they ever!! They want to know who this handsome "night owl" is and why does Miss Mary keep insisting that she knows him from somewhere in her past? Well, that is absolutely impossible!! That would make their handsome James over 100 years old!! Then a series of horrid events begin to take place that rattles Patricia’s nerves.

Among these "horrid events" is the arrival of a large horde of rats. She just knows that James is up to no good and there's something "so "wrong" about him"...but nobody believes her. What does she know... she’s ONLY a housewife. However, Patricia knows to the bottom of her "little Southern soul" that evil personified has bought a house and now is making itself right at home in her neighborhood.

The character of Patricia grew immensely from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman who is determined to do the right thing...hopefully with the help of her new friends. This author does a magnificent job of working established and well-known vampire lore into a really fantastic story. Here he has shown that he’s a bit of a master at conjuring up nostalgia of the 1990's. Fans of horror will eat this one up. show less

"One thing I’ve learned from all these books: it pays to be paranoid."

This was a wonderful, frightening, frustrating read. It paints the South very accurately - ugly and all. It shows that women aren't really full of Southern hospitality or charm but rather are little self involved and competitive. It did show the power of a book and how well it can hold together friendships and help weather rough times. It was wonderful to read all the fun reads they had but it was torture to actually go through the mystery, only because I was frustrated by the way the main characters were treated. The ending was well done and played out accurately and in an interesting way. I love that things aren't defined and everything isn't clearly explained to show more us. Instead, we are left wondering a bit- and hopeful. I will definitely read more from this author, I've lover everything so far! show less