“He thinks we’re what we look like on the outside: nice Southern ladies. Let me tell you something…there’s nothing nice about Southern ladies.”
― Grady Hendrix
I love a great vampire story, unfortunately, they're hard to find. The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires did not disappoint. This is a Southern-gothic horror novel reminiscent of Flannery O’ Connor’s style of writing, specifically, her short story, A Good Man Is Hard To Find.
Set in Charleston South Carolina during the early to mid-1990s, a group of housewives forms a book club that focuses on true-crime literature. Aside from the disturbing subject matter they read, their lives are relatively placid and filled with the everyday routines of keeping house for their husbands and children. The main protagonist, Patricia is enthralled and somewhat ashamed of the subject matter she and her friends read in the book club. At times, though, she feels angst toward the direction her life has taken, how unremarkable and humdrum it’s become. She wishes that just once something exciting would happen. Excitement does come in the form of a new neighbor, James Harris. It’s unclear where James is from, his story changes depending on whom he’s talking to, and James has some strange habits. Over the course of Patricia’s friendship with James, disturbing aspects of his character come to light. When Patricia learns that her neighbor is not who he pretends to be, but someone or something that may be preying on the community, she makes it her mission to stop him, but James has already gained the trust of Patricia’s husband and the husbands of her friends.
This is a well-written novel, with rich descriptions that run from idyllic, to unsettling, to masterfully grotesque. The dialogue is sprinkled with southernisms, the characters likable and deeply flawed.
As a reader you are lulled into Patricia’s domestic world, her everyday worries of laundry, school lunches, and house cleaning, and the warm friendships she forms with the other women in the book club. The club is a place for them to get away and let their hair down a bit, drink cheap wine, read trashy novels, eat junky snacks and take a whack at dissecting the mindset of serial killers.
Quirky and sometimes darkly humorous, The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires also reads likes a cozy mystery. It uses the tropes of small-town life, and a benign cozy activity the characters revolve around, in this case, the book club, Patricia acting as the amateur sleuth. Yet, the author also makes a mockery of small-town southern life and its pleasantries, as well as the traditional gender roles, exaggerating them so that it almost feels a little Stepford, a little nineteen fiftyish, although it’s the 1990s. A parallel theme in this tale is the banality of the kept woman and her smothered potential, niceties, and etiquette standing in for true feelings or truth in general until one’s life becomes a sort of aberration. Etiquette is the aide that holds Patricia’s community in the diabolical grip of the smiling well-mannered new-comer, and it takes our protagonist a long time, years, in fact, for her to realize that she needs to throw her nice girl cloak off and finally get real before she loses everything.
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Amazon editors say...
Fun and funny with a dark, supernatural undercurrent, this '90s-era horror story puts a new face on vampires.
Vannessa Cronin, Amazon EditorPopular highlight
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Top reviews from other countries
Shelley
Highly entertaining, frightening, and just what I was looking for!
Reviewed in Canada on October 26, 2021
lee woodward
Super easy reading page turner
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 17, 2024
Thiago Sardenberg
"Eu queria colocar Drácula contra minha mãe; como você verá, não é uma luta justa"
Reviewed in Brazil on May 27, 2021
Thiago Sardenberg
Reviewed in Brazil on May 27, 2021
Num pacato subúrbio americano onde nada muito fora do comum jamais acontece, Patricia, que havia abandonado sua carreira para dedicar-se à família (que constantemente não a valoriza, a desacredita, a invisibializa), só deseja que sua vida tivesse um pouco da emoção das histórias fantásticas de seu clube de leitura. É, Patricia, cuidado com o que você deseja...
O livro consegue equilibrar muito bem mistério, diversão e terror, tornando-se uma daquelas leituras que você mal pode esperar pra saber como vai terminar. Tem uma protagonista forte, que é uma voz da razão em meio ao negacionismo que a rodeia (alô Brasil 2020/21?) e um antagonista que figura mais como uma ameaça, pairando e exercendo sua influência sobre a vida de Patricia e das mulheres do clube – ele raramente revela sua verdadeira face, mas quando a revela, são cenas absolutamente aterrorizantes.
Esse foi meu primeiro contato com a escrita do Grady Hendrix e eu já estou de olho em seus outros livros! Recomendo bastante essa original e muito bem vinda adição à literatura vampiresca!
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