Reviews with content warning for Mental illness - The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

I really enjoyed this book. I thought it was an interesting take on the vampire trope, and the fact that it was driven by women/housewives who are usually seen as helpless was refreshing.

It doesn't get top marks from me, because even though the book acknowledges the difference between white and black people in the south it feels like it could be a bit more fleshed out to really hit the spot.

All in all an enjoyable read!

Content Warnings

writtenontheflyleaves's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-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

4.75

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

📚 The plot: Patricia Campbell is feeling stifled. Her husband works too much; her teenage daughter is shutting her out and her son is obsessed with Nazis. What keeps her sane is her book club: a group of housewives who read true crime stories about charismatic men with murderous intentions. When handsome James Harris comes to town, trailed by a string of deaths, Patricia is well-equipped to put together the truth about him - but convincing her book club and their husbands that her suspicions are more than a bored housewife's fantasy will be harder than she imagined...

Let's not beat around the bush: Grady Hendrix is bloody good. I love how he uses horror tropes to unpack everyday issues - in My Best Friend's Exorcism it was teenage female friendship; in Horrorstör, it was work; in this book, it's domestic misogyny.

From the start, Patricia is dismissed and belittled and bullied, by the ordinary men around her as well as the supernatural one who infiltrates their community. It took my breath away at times how exactly Hendrix described her experiences of sexism and the power dynamics at play when men decide to disbelieve women.

But although Hendrix gives his women characters their moments of weakness and failure, ultimately his books are about the many ways that there are for women to be strong.

Triumph over evil in a Hendrix book doesn't look like just one thing: a lone woman escaping danger. Instead, it looks like ordinary women standing up for themselves and each other. They use the strengths that have previously been dismissed as frivolous or stupid to fight back, whether that's the force of their teenage devotion to one another (like in MBFE), or the skills they learned from mothering children, cleaning houses, reading Ann Rule. Hendrix speaks directly back to misogyny in the horror genre, and it intensifies both the horror and the final triumph.

Basically, any male horror writer who's ever written a woman character as just a pair of floating tits should look at what Hendrix is doing and feel deeply inadequate x

🧛 Read it if you love psychological thrillers and deep studies of sexism in suburban settings. Also if you want to read a book that validates how hardcore motherhood is.

🚫 Avoid it if you hate rats (don't ask, just trust me), mild gore or mention of blood and needles, and if you're avoiding content around sexual assault and rape.

Content Warnings

beccamlvn's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

3.25

Took a break from my usual romances... andddd wtf did I just read?!

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shieldbearer's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

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

5.0

“The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires” is about how a small-town white community reacts when faced with a threat from the outside. How much can one sacrifice for safety and prosperity and who pays for those sacrifices? Who- and what- is worth protecting? How culpable is the one who watches and does nothing?

This is a book that features deeply human, but nuanced, female characters. The female characters have rich inner lives and personalities even when operating within the social norms of their small Southern town. This is an nuanced, layered exploration of womanhood- particularly how white womanhood is affected by white privilege. People dismissing the characters as "doormats" have clearly ignored the parts of the book that scream that they are choosing prosperity and security over the lives of Black children, which is easily one of the most realistic parts of the book. The author is a man, but his mother inspired him to write this book, and it truly shows. I wish more female characters were written with this flawed complexity. I also really felt the author did a good job building and releasing tension.

Also. Y'all need to get better at adding tags. We get graphic second hand accounts of both sexual assault and racism (a man was literally LYNCHED) and half of y'all only tag the sexual assault?? I think that proves my point.

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