The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

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So while I was annoyed with her ungrateful children, I was more annoyed with her for raising ungrateful children. Cleverly, different sections of the book are titled after real-life True Crime books. These are based upon what the Club is reading during the period of time we are following in the novel.

Bratty Teenage Daughter: Korey. She is constantly rude to Patricia and refers to Patricia as stupid even before James enters the neighborhood. It gets worse after James starts grooming her. The wives kept their silence till their children’s lives are also in danger. Could they stop this dangerous man? Is he a real man or is he a kind of supernatural creature? Let’s find out! I truly deeply madly in love with this book! More than five gazillion stars! Somebody has to stop my fingers adding entire books of the author to my nearly collapsing Mount TBR! But I cannot stop with only one book. Can I? there are definitely standout scenes that get intense. like v.c. andrews, everything that happens in the attic is gross and wrong and full of things going into places they have no business going. i’ve always had squeam when it comes to eye-horror, but this is my first time ever squirming over ear-horror, which was not the ear-biting referenced in that opening quote. you'll know it when you read it. 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?!

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. I'm not quite sure how best to describe this. In some ways, it's a heartwarming and funny story about a - you guessed it - Southern book club. There's so much female friendship and a good few laughs, but despite how the title and cover look, it isn't campy like I feared. In fact, as well as being fun, this book made me really frustrated and angry in parts. I hate it (and can't stop angry-reading) when women are patronized and gaslighted. Reading about gaslighting really makes me anxious, and the way the women in this book are talked down to because they are "silly" housewives made my blood boil. About halfway through, I had to put the book down because I was SO stressed by it. Also - that ending. Perfection. Sheer perfection! 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 really enjoyed the first 1/3 of Grady Hendrix's The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires. It does a great job of setting up our cast of southern mothers who live these complacent, boring lives and decide to spice it up by organizing a book club that reads a mix of murder mysteries, romance, and thrillers.

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.

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Then a mysterious stranger comes around. He’s handsome, a helpless man stranded in a strange county as he has to deal with his mother’s death. Patricia helps (of course! What good, god-fearing woman wouldn’t aid a stranger in need?) and James Harris finds himself with an ID, a bank account, and an invitation for dinner. Of course we care,” Kitty said. “But we’re a book club, not the police. What are we supposed to do?” Well, sometimes you just need to do what needs to be done. Because, as we learn, in the end, “there’s nothing nice about Southern ladies.” As local children start disappearing, rumors of a Boogie Man luring them into the woods begin to surface.