The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix – Review

Published: April 7, 2020

Publisher: Quirk Books

Series: Standalone

Genre: Horror

Pages: 404 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 4.0/5.0

Synopsis:

Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the ’90s about a women’s book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a blood-sucking fiend.

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.

But when an artistic and sensitive stranger moves into the neighborhood, the book club’s meetings turn into speculation about the newcomer. Patricia is initially attracted to him, but when some local children go missing, she starts to suspect the newcomer is involved. She begins her own investigation, assuming that he’s a Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. What she uncovers is far more terrifying, and soon she–and her book club–are the only people standing between the monster they’ve invited into their homes and their unsuspecting community.

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I spent a couple months eagerly awaiting the release date of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. It had such an exciting premise and I couldn’t wait to see a group of southern housewives go full on Buffy and slay a vampire menacing their neighborhood. That’s… sort of what I got. It certainly didn’t play out how I had expected, which isn’t entirely a bad thing. I like when books can surprise me and occasionally turn my expectations upside down in a good way. 

As you might have inferred from the synopsis (go you, you can hypothesize!) the main character of this book is Patricia Campbell and her group of southern housewife friends in the Mount Pleasant area of South Carolina. They have a monthly book club where they read true crime and talk about murder because let’s face it, sometimes you need to talk to someone your own age about something a little more engaging than what the kids are doing. Then the mysterious James Harris moves in down the street from Patricia and at first he seems charming, if a little strange. Then things start happening and his unusual characteristics make Patricia suspicious that, at the very least, he’s not who he says he is. Turns out he’s a blood sucking predator and Patricia seems to be the only one who can see that he’s a threat. Everyone else is convinced he’s a charming fellow and he’s invested so much into their businesses and personal lives that surely he can’t be a murderer.

This was a wild story – it went from mundane to horrific and back again that sometimes I nearly got whiplash. There were some horrific moments, which I wasn’t surprised by as this is listed as a horror story, but WOW they triggered some primal revulsion in me. I mean, RATS. EUUGHHH. This is more of a psychological horror than a slasher type book and honestly, the worst offenders were the husbands!! The real horror is how Patricia’s husband basically gaslit her and she just kind of figured that maybe she was crazy! They were all pretty awful and brushed of the concerns of their wives because they were a bunch of silly housewives, notwithstanding the fact that they were all intelligent women. James Harris was certainly a monster, but if they had banded together from the beginning and hadn’t cowed before their idiot husbands this would have been a much shorter book.

Overall, this was a good read if one that was somewhat infuriating. The psychological abuse Patricia received from her own family was so much worse to read about than the vampire terrorizing vulnerable children. It took me awhile to get through the audiobook, just because I kept getting mad and had to put it down for a little while. The narration was done very well and each character has a very unique (and southern) voice. Despite my frustrations with some of the characters, this was an engaging book that kept me guessing the entire time. I was never quite sure how things would turn out and things would de-escalate for just long enough to lull you… and then WHAM, MORE HORROR!