Reviews tagging 'Fatphobia'

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

22 reviews

georgiashakey's review

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

2.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Gore, Rape, Violence, Murder, Racism, Blood, Dementia, Gaslighting, Toxic relationship, Pedophilia, and Sexism

Moderate: Death of parent, Fatphobia, Grief, Domestic abuse, Animal death, Classism, Drug use, and Suicide attempt

Minor: Vomit

sarabara's review

dark tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Frustrating to read. All the women characters were either doormats or victims. I get that authors need their characters to go through a character arc--they have to suffer and struggle in order to grow. But for 300+ pages, I was just annoyed at every woman character. I hate reading about doormats. 

On the one hand, the story is interesting--nostalgic, weird, and gross--all things I like in a book. There is good tension, good stakes, prose is decent. But I don't want to spend time being frustrated. It wasn't enjoyable.
And I understand there are loads of women doormats. But for decades, books were filled with stereotypes of women like this, as though this was all a woman could be. So when a male author decides to write a campy story where the character arc is a female stereotype going from coward to brave, it's cringy. 

And I get that the misogyny perpetuated by the husbands is meant to act as a another source of terror on the protagonist and her friends. The feeling of suffocation and helplessness and gaslighting that the female protagonist feels is intentional, another layer of horror. However the way the author wrote the female characters felt off, in not a good way. They lacked the nuance and strength most women I know have. I wonder how this story would have been written by a southern woman.

Also, there were so many choices by the author that just felt lazy, choices that were transparently intended to create tension but completely unrealistic. I know this is a story about vampires but

when the vampire says "I can feel my spine healing" that is the third opportunity these characters had to cut off his head and didn't.

That is a lazy author choice meant to add to the word count. So annoying. 

This book makes me not trust the author to write women. I don't want to spend time with his characters if this is how he writes them.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Gore, Gaslighting, and Misogyny

Moderate: Classism, Racism, Rape, and Suicide attempt

Minor: Animal death, Dementia, and Fatphobia

arosereads's review

dark tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

This book had potential and completely fell flat. The author tried to make social commentary about race, class, and gender, and the parallel between vampirism and gentrification was promising, but it completely fell flat. While the author was trying to make commentary about misogyny, ultimately the female characters are two dimensional stereotypical personalities rooted in misogyny rather than fully fleshed out characters with development. For a novel that centers the pain of a Black community, it is very much glossed over and ultimately there is only 1 recurring Black character (Mrs. Greene) who doesn’t even get a first name until 2/3 of the way through the book. She is also constantly cleaning up after the white protagonists and doesn’t get centered in the narrative enough.

There are other aspects that made me very uncomfortable too, not limited to the multiple graphic depictions of sexual assault (one of which is a minor), the casual fatphobia/body shaming, the obsession that the son has with N*zis which is never dealt with and only used to show Patricia is a “bad mom” (?????), the trivialization of suicide and mental illness (the symptoms of the “sickness” the kids get seems to parallel addiction and the subject matter isn’t approached with the sensitivity it deserves), and then the demonization of mental health professionals (Carter is HORRIBLE and uses his psychology expertise to manipulate his family and Patricia pulls her daughter from the mental hospital and the novel makes a point of saying it’s against doctors orders etc), and domestic violence is brought up and glossed over and ultimately the butt of a weird joke? Overall, there are a lot of complex and delicate topics covered in this book, and none of them are really done well or appropriately.

I only gave 2 stars because while the pacing was slow, I did really like the author’s descriptions in the horror scenes. The part in the attic was very visceral and gave me chills and the gory scene at the end was well written and descriptive. It’s clear that Grady Hendrix should stick to icky horror stuff and leave the social commentary to those who are more well equipped to handle it properly.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Rape and Violence

Moderate: Suicide, Domestic abuse, Adult/minor relationship, and Gaslighting

Minor: Misogyny, Antisemitism, Racism, and Fatphobia

vonny3492's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This book was extremely gripping and there was a certain point where the behavior of some secondary characters made me want to reach into the book and strangle them, and I had to resist skipping to the end to make sure they got what they deserved.... So engaging!

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Rape, Violence, and Gore

Moderate: Child abuse, Adult/minor relationship, Drug abuse, Physical abuse, Classism, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Death of parent, Death, and Dementia

Minor: Fatphobia, Animal cruelty, and Animal death

snowforest's review

adventurous dark tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Cannibalism, Child death, Child abuse, Death, Death of parent, Gore, Mental illness, Misogyny, Murder, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Suicide attempt, Violence, and Forced institutionalization

Moderate: Addiction, Adult/minor relationship, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Dementia, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Grief, Infidelity, Medical content, Mental illness, Medical trauma, Panic attacks/disorders, Racism, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Toxic friendship, and Toxic relationship

Minor: Abandonment, Animal cruelty, Body horror, Chronic illness, Cursing, Fatphobia, Gaslighting, and Xenophobia

gfrankensteinem's review

0.25

This book is TERRIBLE. I bought it thinking it would be a light-hearted and sassy comic read for a two week road trip. Instead, it was a triggering story about a pedophile/rapist and a bunch of southern men who don't believe women - and other women who refuse to do the right thing because their husbands tell them to stop investigating said rapist. It's not even well-written! Seriously mad this even got published, even more so that I put money in this awful man's pocket with my purchase. Can't express enough how much I hope you all stay away from this book. Don't let it fool you the way it fooled me.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Pedophilia, Rape, Fatphobia, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, and Xenophobia

Seriously I broke down sobbing halfway through this book because of a series of graphic sexual assault scenes which come out of nowhere, including one very graphic child rape description.

labinsky's review

adventurous dark tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

first off there are just so many content warnings for this book so check that because you think you know what you’re getting into and the contents of the book does NOT match the tone of what’s on the tin.

this book is definitely a page turner, it’s over 400 pages and i finished it in under a day and i’m definitely not a fast reader. but just because it’s a page turner doesn’t make it good or mean that this book is well executed. it’s supposed to be a social commentary about racism and sexism and the way we accept the stuff of horror stories because we live in an unjust society. and it almost does that. but it’s written by a white man who capitalises southern and not Black. 

of course a horror novel is going to be graphic. of course it’s going to be gory and isn’t for the faint-hearted.

but there’s graphic depictions of lynching, rape, statutory rape, suicide, and suicide attempts. the main character’s white, christian adolescent son has an obsession with nazis that is entirely unnecessary, treated as only slightly concerning by his parents, and was stomach-churning for me to read as a jewish person.

and there’s plenty of run of the mill horror genre gore on top of this, which i fully expected going in, but everything else felt like when tarantino writes himself into a movie and his character says the n-slur with the hard r at least a dozen times. 

if someone with the lived experience of racism and sexism had written this book and if it was told from the perspectives of multiple characters (ie, mrs greene), it would have been a better book. it could have made the point it was trying to make. but instead of being a commentary about not only the horror genre but the society we live in, hendrix missed the mark.

in his version, a single vampire, not the world we live in, is identified the source of the violent racism and sexism and it goes away when they slay the vampire.

it falls short and it’s so frustrating because it could be such a good book, but it isn’t.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Body horror, Child abuse, Death, Emotional abuse, Gore, Hate crime, Murder, Pedophilia, Racism, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Suicide attempt, and Violence

Moderate: Alcoholism, Antisemitism, Death of parent, Fatphobia, Forced institutionalization, Sexism, and Suicide

cate_with_a_c's review against another edition

It was good until it wasn’t. I didn’t like that all the men didn’t believe their wives when they were concerned for their children. Lots of sexism and fat phobia. I got bored about the half way point and couldn’t justify finishing it. Seemed like the women start out strong and the obvious abuse from some of the husbands was unnecessary and upsetting.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Cannibalism, Dementia, Suicide, and Suicide attempt

Moderate: Antisemitism, Fatphobia, and Domestic abuse

riella_reads's review

adventurous dark tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

 Wow, that was a ride. I'm not totally sure what to rate it, because I was expecting a little more mystery behind it, and I felt like there wasn't really any. This had a lot of ick factors, and a couple characters I wanted to reach through the pages and slap. Overall this was really good. It was my second book by this author (first was BFF Exorcism) and I will continue to read more of his work. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Blood, Body horror, Child abuse, Child death, Death, Death of parent, Dementia, Emotional abuse, Fatphobia, Gaslighting, Gore, Infidelity, Medical content, Medical trauma, Mental illness, Murder, Panic attacks/disorders, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Stalking, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide attempt, Violence, and Vomit

bookish_affections's review

dark mysterious tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Rape, Sexual assault, Adult/minor relationship, Blood, Child death, Child abuse, Sexual violence, Suicide, and Violence

Moderate: Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Misogyny, and Death

Minor: Fatphobia