The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix (2020)

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix (2020)

A story of female friendship when faced with a threat in the deep south during the 90s. 

Laura’s Rating: 1.5/5 Stars

Plot: Patricia and a group of Southern housewives form a book club that reads true crime. What they don’t expect is for a predator to be lurking right in their own serene neighborhood. Can Patricia uncover the truth before it’s too late?

Opinion: I was taking notes while reading this and had to keep re-writing them before they became this review. That’s because I kept having to revise how much I disliked this book and why.

Initially, I liked seeing the prim and proper Southern woman letting their guards down and finding comfort in one another. They not only read “trashy” books, but they also admit to parenting shortcuts, complain about their families, and relate to the never-ending responsibilities and pressures of motherhood. 

However, most of the women falter when it comes time to actually take action. More than once, the women want to defer to their husbands and doubt Patricia (their supposed friend) when she asks for help. Don’t even get me started on the husbands…such misogynistic jerks! And the kids are ungrateful brats too. By the end of the book, I was disappointed in almost every character.

I think tonally, this book is inconsistent. It doesn’t really read as horror immediately and it feels a little too light for the weight of children being victimized and characters being sexually assaulted. It eventually gets more serious, but then there’s the gross descriptions of rats, roaches, spiders, etc. which I didn’t want to read…

After an initially pleasant start, the story lost my interest and got boring for a while. When it gets interesting again, it’s because I was steaming mad at most of the characters and disgusted by the plot. It got worse and worse as the novel went on… I genuinely thought about not finishing it. You can say that there’s subtext about racism or sexism but it reads pretty surface level to me. Reflecting back on it, the book is all over the place and I don’t think it’s worth the read.