The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

Product Information

In my opinion, no. So this book didn't work for me as satire because Hendrix is only exposing a problem... a problem that the characters in the book seem to be ok with existing or having existed. I really wanted there to be more critique here, but there just wasn't. A] clever, addictive vampire thriller....This powerful, eclectic novel both pays homage to the literary vampire canon and stands singularly within it.” — Publishers Weekly , starred review

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Patricia Campbell had always planned for a big life, but after giving up her career as a nurse to marry an ambitious doctor and become a mother, Patricia's life has never felt smaller. The days are long, her kids are ungrateful, her husband is distant, and her to-do list is never really done. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a group of Charleston mothers united only by their love for true-crime and suspenseful fiction. In these meetings, they're more likely to discuss the FBI's recent siege of Waco as much as the ups and downs of marriage and motherhood. Just like in the movie theater, when I have to cover my eyes for a few seconds, peeking at the screen between my fingers, there are times in the book where I had to fast skim over the really GROSS parts involving RATS, ROACHES and RACCOONS 🙈 I guess I should mention the good things about this book, but I'm going to make it brief. I enjoyed the writing and the dialogue. I also thought it was a good story, albeit executed poorly. Oh, and I enjoyed how the sections were broken down by what book they were reading that month. And some of the horror elements were pretty cool and well written. And that's all folks! And, then James Harris moves in. And, the children start to disappear in a less affluent part of town. So basically I had been expecting a different kind of vampire book one a little light and fluffy (if that's possible with a vampire story) and a character with a great voice. The voice is there and the light part is for the first half. Love the cover by way, great construction and graphics.

Then she got in her Volvo and hoped Grace was right and this was all just a product of the overactive imagination of a stupid little housewife with too much free time on her hands. If it was, she promised herself, tomorrow she would vacuum her curtains. Spiritual Antithesis: In the foreword, Hendrix stated that he intended it as this to another of his novels, My Best Friend's Exorcism. Both are set in Charlestown in relatively recent historical periods (the 1980s in the case of the latter, and the 1990s for this one), cover years, and show female friendship facing off against an otherworldly evil that is ultimately defeated through perseverance. However, while that book was written from a teenage point of view and presented the adults as useless, this book is told from the parents' point of view and is about them trying to protect their families.

Fried Green Tomatoesand Steel Magnoliasmeet Draculain this horror novel set in 1990s suburban Charleston

But that's the whole point. In the author's note, Hendrix states that he "wanted to pit Dracula against my mom". It's a nod to those women who carry out the majority of the childcare and household chores, as well as shouldering the emotional burden. And, hell, these housewives might vacuum their curtains and freeze 60 sandwiches at the beginning of the month for school lunches, but they have some serious claws.

Success!

Mammy: Mrs. Greene is one, and it's one of the most polarizing elements of the story. Is she a deconstruction because she's supposed to show how out of touch the wealthy white women are from her deprived "ghetto" life, or is she actually a reconstruction because she still forgives them and shows the mammy's caring for upper-class white society along with her extreme competence? Delightful read that reads like Dracula set in the ’90s American South….Perfect for fans of horror and real-life crime alike.”— Good Housekeeping it's set up to be this perfect storm of genres and themes and conflicts, but it doesn't quite shazam. i love that the entity is a little newfangled spin on the traditional, but the character work of developing the women apart from patricia is pretty bare and there is some…prolonged downtime in this book, where nothing much is happening, or rather, nothing is building; and then there's a time-jump, and it's all a little messy and uneven.

Several of these women have a little book club where they alternate real life true crime (the higher the body count the better) and thriller fiction that can only hope to match the real life crime stories. So when Patricia begins to suspect something very wrong about a handsome newcomer to their community, her husband, his friends and even her book club members think that it's her imagination running wild, after all the real and fictional crimes she has been reading about with the book club. But, Patricia is really on to something with her suspicions about this newcomer. He IS a thing of fiction, come to life, and he is consuming and preying on the young and old of the area, with no one but Patricia thinking he is anything but a financial savior for their little community. Devil in Plain Sight: James is one of these as Patricia becomes more and more aware of this; it's suggested, in fact, that he used the boundaries of polite society to achieve this, rather than his actual vampiric powers. I will stress, one more time, that while this book has a soft start, which feels like it will be a slow ramp up to desiccated horror fest, it is instead a fireworks display. It lulls you into watching, waiting for the horror, and when it comes it is startling, visceral, disturbing, and hard to read. Like all great fireworks shows, the horror is not easy to predict, and it’s hard to watch without flinching. This isn’t your mother’s vampire story. (Well… maybe not yours.) I have been a fan of Grady since Horrorstor and was really looking forward to this one, but it's just not very good. Every meeting they go over the latest true-crime or grisly detective book. It is the one time that Patricia feels like herself.

Media Reviews

This is a whole different ball of wax. I don’t know what to compare it to, but I’ll tell you what it has: The display of racism in this book is so problematic, and I just wish this book had something powerful to say about all of this, but as it is, it just perpetuates negative stereotypes. Blood Bath: Played with. James is a vampire, but his actual blood bath comes up when the book club, and Mrs Green, get him into the bathtub and chop him up, meaning that he doesn't get into it or choose to soak into it, but he ends up there through circumstances. Yeah, that rings a bell. I did the stay-at-home mom thing for a couple of decades, so there's another thing we have in common. FINALLY. I have found my first five star book of the year that wasn’t a reread or non-fiction! This book is basically Desperate Housewives set in the late 80s/early 90s and the housewives started a true crime book club, only for a vampire to move in down the street... sounds awesome, right?!