The New York Times Best SellerA Barnes & Noble Best Fiction Book of 2020A Goodreads Choice Awards FinalistSteel Magnolias meets Dracula in this ’90s-set horror novel about a women’s book club that must do battle with a mysterious newcomer to their small Southern town, perfect for murderinos and fans of Stephen King.Bonus features: • Reading group guide for book clubs • Hand-drawn map of … features:
• Reading group guide for book clubs
• Hand-drawn map of Mt. Pleasant
• Annotated true-crime reading list by Grady Hendrix
• And more!
Patricia Campbell’s life has never felt smaller. Her husband is a workaholic, her teenage kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she’s always a step behind on her endless to-do list. The only thing keeping her sane is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime. At these meetings they’re as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are about their own families.
One evening after book club, Patricia is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbor, bringing the neighbor’s handsome nephew, James Harris, into her life. James is well traveled and well read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn’t felt in years. But when children on the other side of town go missing, their deaths written off by local police, Patricia has reason to believe James Harris is more of a Bundy than a Brad Pitt. The real problem? James is a monster of a different kind—and Patricia has already invited him in.
Little by little, James will insinuate himself into Patricia’s life and try to take everything she took for granted—including the book club—but she won’t surrender without a fight in this blood-soaked tale of neighborly kindness gone wrong.
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Patricia Campbell is a stereotypical ‘80s-‘90s Charleston doctor’s wife. She has the right look and the right hair, she lives in the right neighborhood, her kids go to the right schools, she has the right friends, and she’s bravely taking care of her senile mother-in-law to boot. It’s all a little…stifling. Her one outlet is her book club. Unbeknownst to their husbands, Patricia and her friends love to meet and drink and read “trashy” true crime novels. So you’d think they’d be ready to investigate when children start disappearing from the nearby Black community. Some of them want to help, they really do, but the stakes are high and getting higher. And it’s easy to ignore what isn’t happening in your own neighborhood–until it is.
Whoa! I somehow expected this to be funny as well as scary. Look at that title. Can’t you just see the ‘80s moms with their big hair going after the bad guy? Maybe staking him with a stiletto heel after a cocktail party? It had its moments but mostly it was really, really dark. Like, really dark. And trigger-ish for some readers.
The pacing of the story was great for me, starting off a little slow, a little questioning, then building to small peaks of nail-biting suspense, easing off a bit, and repeating and getting more and more suspenseful until the big finale. There were enough twists and turns to keep me guessing. And is there room for a sequel? I’m not sure….
Aside from the vampire horror story, there was (and still is) a lot wrong in this town. The police just wrote off all the disappearances from the Black community. The kids must have been on drugs, or run away, or gotten themselves killed for a crime they must have committed, right? Grrr…. And the women’s husbands! I wanted to smack them all upside the head a few (dozen) times. They were so chauvinistic, controlling, and condescending! At least the vampire is just doing what vampires do. What excuse do misogynist racists have? It all makes you wonder (as I feel the author intended) who the real villain of the piece is.
Don’t go into this thinking that it’s a fun horror-lite novel. This is real horror on a lot of levels. It does contain triggers for some readers. It can be read for straight entertainment or for a discussion of what exactly is monstrous in our society. I obviously can’t recommend it unilaterally but it worked for me in quite unexpected ways. Pick it up if the synopsis interests you. I’d love to know what you think.
I borrowed my copy of The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires, authored by Grady Hendrix, from my local library, for my book buying eyes are bigger than my book wallet at all times, so help my husband. I do intend to own this title one day, it just has to wait on a list a bit first.
I rated this novel 5 stars.
Hendrix wrote a vampire novel that made fighting a vampire not the *most* difficult thing happening at any given time, or maybe not the *only* difficult thing is more fair, vampires are pretty boss to fight. The author’s note says that My Best Friend’s Exorcism was told from a kids view, this would be from a parents view; same neighborhood, different families, different years. What struck me about this novel most: the stress of regular life does not slow in the least just because a supernatural evil has taken root where you live, you have the audacity to decide to vanquish it, you expect the love and support of your spouse, and just a little benefit of a doubt CARTER, IS THAT TOO MUCH FOR YOU!!….
At this point Grady Hendrix is on my author radar, I know that when he has anything new come out, I will want to read it. His characters could be actual people that you sat across from at the breakfast nook this morning, ran into at the grocery store, even had at your book club. You get swept up in their story, this novel in your hands, it really is bittersweet when the last page is read. I fear not, because if I cherish it on my shelves, with my other loved books, I can revisit anytime I wish. And I wish.
“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 who 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, 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.
I’m from South Carolina and was excited to see this based in Charleston so close to home which is why I picked it up. First, this book wasn’t what I thought it was going to be because I was thinking along the lines of Bram Stoker or Anne Rice but I read it anyway and it did keep me interested. I love how real book titles separated the chapters giving me an idea of what’s to come. However, this book is a perfect example of some women who thought process is “if it doesn’t directly affect me I could care less.” I felt bad for Patricia because at one time I started to believe maybe she is crazy. Grace, even though she came through in the end I didn’t like her. Slick was a ride-or-die friend. This book does vaguely remind me of a scene from the first season of The Vampire Diaries where the old man swore he knew Stefan from the past and he looks the same. But if you already have an inkling something isn’t right and your old mother-in-law (Miss Mary) starts calling him by another name and telling what he has done I would have immediately gone into research mood. However, I’m still left with the question of why is he the only one? How did he get that way? And so on. Overall, it was pretty good.
I didn’t care for this book. It dragged a bit and there wasn’t any action. However, it was different and original, for that reason I give it three stars.
I really enjoyed reading this book. A monster has moved into the neighborhood and only the local Book Club wives are capable of stopping him. Despite the horror I was surprised at how much I laughed. I really liked the Southern setting and the characters, even though many were amazingly stupid and naive . It is a fun quick read, gross and funny. Perfect for this time of year Enjoy
This book was marketed as a cross between Steel Magnolia’s and Dracula and it delivered on every level. Grady’s writing is like brain candy and I felt like I was ten-years-old reading Fear Street again. I couldn’t put it down!
This is a fun read. Though “fun” might be the wrong word. The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is a complex and compelling book, but a brutal and bloody one.
Set in Charleston in the 1990s, Patricia and her friends are living the “suburban housewife dream.” A dream built around the conformity of defined roles of the three great ‘isms of American life–racism, sexism and classism. From the start, there are cracks in this utopia, particularly in Patricia’s marriage. But when a Dracula-like figure moves into the neighborhood, everything quite literally goes to hell.
A horror story is only as good as the evil it seeks to portray, and in this gem of a book Hendrix creates one of the most compelling vampires I’ve seen in quite a time. Going by the white-bread name of James Harris, he is an immortal creature of endless hunger. Not content with mere blood, he wants to take everything from his victims–money, status, and ultimately their humanity. Hmmm, I smell a metaphor here.
Plot-wise, Harris is the serpent in the garden, only this is no Eden. As he first seduces those with the most power–AKA the white men–the layers of hypocrisy and inner rot are stripped away from this seeming bucolic island. As Patricia slowly realizes the threat to herself and her children, she struggles to do the right thing.
At its essence, this novel is about the choices people make. Isn’t that what a life is? A bunch of choices. But that doesn’t mean everyone gets the same set of options from which to choose.
The African American maid Mrs. Green–one of many brilliantly conceived characters–strives to protect her family and community, but her power is limited. If these women are to defeat this undead creature, they need one another.
Though awash with gore and blood, this story is somehow touching and very real. Highly recommended!
Funny, scary, and so heart-warming. I loved every little bit of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. The story follows the highs and lows of housewife, Patricia’s, furtive investigation into the new man in the neighborhood. He’s charming, intelligent, and seems to have everyone eating out of his hand. But is there something more to him than meets the eye? Patricia seems to think so and nothing would make her feel safer than to convince her closest friends of this, the ladies of a Mount Pleasant book club. Ladies who are all interested in reading about crime, gruesome murder, and dastardly deeds. Will her friends believe her?
Grady Hendrix has created a vivid and deep world that stretches over the span of a decade in a small Southern town. Absolutely fell in love with the characters and their friendship.
First off let me say I have a major love hate relationship with this book, but in the best way possible! I am from South Carolina so most of this book was like going back to my childhood and made reading it that much better for me. I was able to relate to it on another level than most. Sadly some parts that I could relate to I wish I couldn’t. Let me explain… the men in this book think the women are only good for one thing and that is raising babies and keeping the house… unfortunately in some parts of the south this is still true. I grew up seeing this , not in my own family but in people around me. I also grew up seeing racism worse than it was shown in this book, it gave a small glimpse in a flashback but to be honest racism is unfortunately alive and rampant in the south which is part of the reason my husband and I moved away. We chose to raise our daughter somewhere that people were treated better.. its not perfect here in Indiana but it is better. So anyway, reading how the men degraded the women really bothered me but it was necessary for the story and it was truthful for the time. Now for the rest of the story… I loved loved it all !! It had me up all night reading and took over my days. The suspense and mystery were so good and kept me wanting more. The vampire had me loving and hating him throughout this story and the entire time I was rooting for Patricia. Patricia has to be the strongest mama bear I have ever seen! Don’t mess with her! This is by far one of the best vampire stories I have read and I cannot wait to read more from this author!
The title alone made this a no-brainer pick for my book club. The votes were almost unanimous!
First off, this is a must-read for fans of the genre. The book is full of scenes filled with tension and horrors that will deeply unsettle you. Sometimes it’s because of the monster, and other times it’s because of humans who are equally monstrous. Both create an environment that is wonderfully treacherous for our heroine.
I give a lot of props to the author not for his new spin on the vampire mythos, but for seeming to have a great understanding of the themes that are most essential to the true terror of the “Other” and for using those themes effectively. Some of the more shocking moments (and there are some, believe me) had a lot of precedence in this sense and enriched the story by linking it more deeply to its roots in the genre. That being said, note that there is a lot of body horror in this book, so if you are not a fan, you might find it harder to enjoy.
Some “know before you go” (i.e. MILD SPOILERS) includes: the aftermath of sexual assault, violence against children, and, yes, the dog dies (not at the beginning but at the very end of old age after a long and happy life).
“Y’know, I could eat a peach for hours…” – Nicolas Cage, FACE/OFF
Oh, dear. I got duped. There were so many raving (although generic) reviews about The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires, yet I didn’t learn to slay anything except my sanity. u2063
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I’m about to tell you the story I thought I was listening to on my lastest drive back to Los Angeles and you cannot laugh. Okay, you can, but not too loud. u2063
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I was an hour into the book with nothing resembling a first plot point (immediate red-flag) but the witty banter over the true-crime book club was funny and the men were so awful–misogynistic and dismissive–that I had an epiphany. u2063
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Yes! I thought. u2063
It’s supposed to be horrible because it’s making a statement. It’s so offensive and shallow because it’s actually deeper than what’s on the page. u2063
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(The drive is very long people)u2063
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So, I’m feeling good about myself for figuring out the real beauty of the novel. I kept going, all while convincing myself it was a political commentary about today. Trump is the vampire demon guy. The husbands are those republicans who suck up for their own benefit. The son is studying to be a little Nazi. No one gives guidance to any of the children. Everyone discounts and manipulates the women who are pitted against each other constantly. Then there’s vomit-inducing unveiled racism and stereotypes throughout because “it’s the south”.u2063
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It had to be a farce. ?u2063
Otherwise, what did I just listen to for 13 hours?u2063
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Nope. No farse. No metaphor. The (male) author said it was just about the southern ladies he grew up around. (Thanks for the pube commentary then)u2063
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WTF? I cannot express how offensive this book was. What editors oversaw this? How can the same house that published Daisy Jones put this out? u2063
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To top things off, the ending was so anti-climatic. There was no vampire slaying. Spoiler: ‘ . No big exciting methods or even a plausible solution. There’s no way that ending works.u2063
Wow
I’m pleasantly surprised at this novel, it was not what I was expecting after reading the description.
Grady Hendrix does a great job at writing a vivid story, he draws you into the book with amazing details, I love that!
My problem is with the horror and paranormal aspects of the story, they are a bit thin. I would call this a Suspense not so much a horror story as there isn’t very much that I would consider horror elements, save for one particularly gory scene that’s not quite frightening so much as impressive in the intensity of what is happening.
As for the Paranormal aspects, we know by the title that this novel involves Vampires, and from the description you would think something along the lines of Dracula, and that’s not quite accurate, I don’t want to give anything away because it was a great read but this is definitely no vampire I have ever heard of or imagined before, I pictured a different well known creature when reading so that was my first issue with the paranormal parts and a minor one my biggest issue with the whole vampire theme is that it was very thin, almost like an afterthought if a few details of the villain were changed this could just be a tale about a psycho serial killer.
All of that said this was a fun and exciting read, the author drew you in with the details in the story and made you feel as if you were there with the characters going through everything they were. It gave me all kinds of emotions towards the regular characters and how they behaved or were treated by others. I laughed at funny parts and got mad at other parts, it was really a great read
Loved, loved, loved it! If you are looking for a funny, scary (and at times gory) page turner to take your mind off of our real life horrors…look no further! This is now my favorite Grady Hendrix book!
Once again, Grady Hendrix has written an engaging page-turner that I couldn’t put down. Well developed characters, an insidious monster, and a nice snapshot of suburban life in the 1990s. Not to mention a great tribute to one of life’s unsung heroes, the dedicated mom and housewife. I loved every minute of this book.
Omg… this book was amazing!! My first 5 of the year!!
Five hilarious stars
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is everything authentically Southern that (bless its heart) Where the Crawdads Sing was not. Plus it was fun, like laugh out loud and slap your momma fun. Fun like The Help, minus all that racism.
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.
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is not for everyone, because it’s gory and absurd, and honestly a whole lot of weird. But it’s also so relatable. (what does that say about me?)
I can’t wait for my book club to read this! Or maybe I’ll suggest we all listen to it? The Audible version is narrated by the brilliantly convincing Bahni Turpin, who coincidentally was also a narrator for The Help. Turpin can switch from stuck-up South Carolinian God-fearer to New Jersey housewife to mesmerizing vampire like it’s no big thing. She’s just that good.
I get it:
I get that Hendrix wrote the characters, especially the protagonist Patricia at a certain time in history that had its particular ideals and expectations about how a person, especially a woman is expected to behave.
I also get:
Slaying Vampires was written with a specific trope in mind: everyone is oblivious to the fact that the bad guy is a bad guy except for the protagonist.
BUT…
Damn it, the women in this book club especially the protagonist are so UGH, so submissive to their husbands that it honestly pissed me off. I spent 67% of the time while listening to this book wanting to slap these women and tell them to stand up for themselves.
The sexism went on until the very end, the very freaking end after they had finally dealt with the “creature” Patricia still did what the hell her husband told her to do.
Facepalm anyone? I couldn’t stand it. I hated Slaying Vampires because of the jello spine of the women in the book club.
Seriously, the women made me want to puke. Also, what’s up with the cover? The cover is very deceptive. The fang marks aren’t anything like the creature represented in the book.
I can’t recommend this book. Honestly, Slaying Vampires is a disservice to women and is compared to Steel Magnolias in the book blurb…no freaking way is that true.
I won’t bother reading any of Hendrix’s work again.
Skip it.