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A review by mitzee
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix
adventurous
dark
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
The title is kind of deceiving because there is not as much slaying as I was expecting but what a whirlwind! This book made me feel so many feelings: anger, fear, disgust, annoyance - and while none of them sound good I had a good time and didn’t want to put it down.
There’s definitely parts of this story that infuriated me,the misogyny both external and internalized, and the just avoidance of confronting anything uncomfortable like addressing when your son is obsessed with Nazis but overall I liked the story. This is my second Hendrix book and I can see a pattern forming of the author just having a different perspective on the world and that coming through in the writing. And it’s not exactly a good or bad perspective - just very different from my own and I’ve had to learn to sit with that discomfort.
Book summary for myself:
Patricia Campbell is the narrator and she is married, has two kids (one boy, one girl of course) and a dog. She lives in a close knit community in North Carolina, I think?
She starts a book club with some other housewives in the neighborhood and they end up meeting regularly to talk about true crime and cult books they have been reading. Also this story is set in the early to mid-nineties.
This random guy moves to town and bad things start happening (adults and young children go missing, or they commit suicide, the Campbells mother in law, hospice caretaker and dog are attacked by a swarm of rats). Patricia goes to visit the hospice worker at her home after she helped stave off the rat attack and finds out a LOT of the kids from the black neighborhoods have gone missing.
Patricia ends up investigating, like in her true crime books, and learns that it’s James Harris - the new neighbor who “has a condition” that makes him averse to sunlight and he doesn’t have an ID or credit cards or bank account is actually a fucking monster who has been feeding on these kids.
She enlists her book club friends to help her take him down but by now he has been meeting with all of their husbands and building a rapport with them. On the day that the book club is supposed to show all the evidence to the police detectives instead the husbands come over and tell their wives that they should be ashamed about spreading rumors and Patricia’s husband makes her APOLOGIZE to this fucking guy, in front of all their friends, their husbands, and her kids. Then the next day he tells her that she needs to be put on Prozac. And she fucking internalizes all this and thinks she’s been not being fair to her family and kids. This is the part that pissed me off the most. Of course Harris, the vampire, knows and he just fucking loved to play with her mind. He’s extremely manipulative.
Three years go by and all of these people are doing so well because of business dealings with James Harris. Everyone is pretending nothing happened three years ago. For some reason this thing gets brought up to Patricia again. I can’t remember how it came up.
She gets a wild hare in her to sneak into his house to find evidence. She enlists the help of her former hospice worker, Mrs Green. The whole house is empty - basically clean to the point of being weirdly unlived in but in the attic she finds a suitcase with the mummified remains of the lady who used to clean this house. He comes home while she’s up there because he was tipped off by one of her friend who said she was going to help. He tries to intimidate her into revealing herself but she doesn’t. At first when he said “I’m looking at you right now” I wasn’t sure if that was real or true, or if he was trying to get her to come out. One of her friends, Kitty, came and found her and also saw the body in the suitcase.
Anyway, later her friend, Slick, who tipped him off calls her crying. She goes over to Slicks and he had sexually assaulted her but left his gross black ooze/slime in her. Slick started dying from that day.
At this point it seems like more people in her book club are willing to help. Plus also Mrs Green. So they devise a plan to basically kill him, based on all the research that Patricia has done about vampires and such in the sci-fi section of the library.
In the end P tries to seduce him and he sees right through her. But she is mentally prepared to die in order to save her kids so she lets him feed on her, meanwhile her friends come to the house and in the door with a bunch of tools and weapons. They attack him while he’s feeding on her. With the focus on separating his brain from the spinal column to paralyze his body. Then work on cutting him into pieces and bagging him up. Originally to incinerate but in the end they end up putting the head in a separate plot from the rest of the body parts.
Patricia ends up divorcing her piece of shit husband who has been cheating on her while also gaslighting her into thinking she’s the reason why her kids are a fucking mess. But the kids want to live with her in the end.
There’s definitely parts of this story that infuriated me,
Book summary for myself:
Patricia Campbell is the narrator and she is married, has two kids (one boy, one girl of course) and a dog. She lives in a close knit community in North Carolina, I think?
She starts a book club with some other housewives in the neighborhood and they end up meeting regularly to talk about true crime and cult books they have been reading. Also this story is set in the early to mid-nineties.
This random guy moves to town and bad things start happening (adults and young children go missing, or they commit suicide, the Campbells mother in law, hospice caretaker and dog are attacked by a swarm of rats). Patricia goes to visit the hospice worker at her home after she helped stave off the rat attack and finds out a LOT of the kids from the black neighborhoods have gone missing.
Patricia ends up investigating, like in her true crime books, and learns that it’s James Harris - the new neighbor who “has a condition” that makes him averse to sunlight and he doesn’t have an ID or credit cards or bank account is actually a fucking monster who has been feeding on these kids.
She enlists her book club friends to help her take him down but by now he has been meeting with all of their husbands and building a rapport with them. On the day that the book club is supposed to show all the evidence to the police detectives instead the husbands come over and tell their wives that they should be ashamed about spreading rumors and Patricia’s husband makes her APOLOGIZE to this fucking guy, in front of all their friends, their husbands, and her kids. Then the next day he tells her that she needs to be put on Prozac. And she fucking internalizes all this and thinks she’s been not being fair to her family and kids. This is the part that pissed me off the most. Of course Harris, the vampire, knows and he just fucking loved to play with her mind. He’s extremely manipulative.
Three years go by and all of these people are doing so well because of business dealings with James Harris. Everyone is pretending nothing happened three years ago. For some reason this thing gets brought up to Patricia again. I can’t remember how it came up.
She gets a wild hare in her to sneak into his house to find evidence. She enlists the help of her former hospice worker, Mrs Green. The whole house is empty - basically clean to the point of being weirdly unlived in but in the attic she finds a suitcase with the mummified remains of the lady who used to clean this house. He comes home while she’s up there because he was tipped off by one of her friend who said she was going to help. He tries to intimidate her into revealing herself but she doesn’t. At first when he said “I’m looking at you right now” I wasn’t sure if that was real or true, or if he was trying to get her to come out. One of her friends, Kitty, came and found her and also saw the body in the suitcase.
Anyway, later her friend, Slick, who tipped him off calls her crying. She goes over to Slicks and he had sexually assaulted her but left his gross black ooze/slime in her. Slick started dying from that day.
At this point it seems like more people in her book club are willing to help. Plus also Mrs Green. So they devise a plan to basically kill him, based on all the research that Patricia has done about vampires and such in the sci-fi section of the library.
In the end P tries to seduce him and he sees right through her. But she is mentally prepared to die in order to save her kids so she lets him feed on her, meanwhile her friends come to the house and in the door with a bunch of tools and weapons. They attack him while he’s feeding on her. With the focus on separating his brain from the spinal column to paralyze his body. Then work on cutting him into pieces and bagging him up. Originally to incinerate but in the end they end up putting the head in a separate plot from the rest of the body parts.
Patricia ends up divorcing her piece of shit husband who has been cheating on her while also gaslighting her into thinking she’s the reason why her kids are a fucking mess. But the kids want to live with her in the end.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Child death, Gore, Sexism, Suicide, Violence, Blood, Murder, Gaslighting, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Rape, Sexual assault, Vomit, Dementia, and Death of parent
Warning that there’s a scene with a lot of detail of insects/invertibrates on a persons body.