Book Review: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires

Spoilers ahead!

Grady Hendrix had me with his Author’s Note when he said he wanted to write a book about his mom battling Dracula. Sold. Thus, reading his 2020 novel, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, I’m not sure I can recall being more engrossed in a novel since perhaps Harry Potter; it’s the kind of engrossed where you’re annoyed at having to stop for a bathroom break or any other reason. But, today, you could say I … went the distance. cue Rocky music. That’s sort of the mantra the women in the book adopt to slay Dracula.

The book title clues you into the premise, but specifically, it is about five “housewives” being dismissed by their husbands (what do you even have to do all day?!) in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, and even being dismissed amongst themselves at various points, while up against a monstrous, devil’s spawn force, a vampire named James Harris. First, what I love about the five women who form the not-a-book-club-book-club is that they abandoned a different, more bourgeois book club rigidly trying to read “classics” in the Western literary canon. Instead, these women want to read the “trashy” drugstore books about true crime in America, like Ann Rule’s classic about Ted Bundy. Of course, that, too, becomes a cudgel the husbands use against them. Second, I love how each of the women, Patricia, Kitty, Maryellen, Slick, and Grace are also distinct characters: Patricia does genuinely want some excitement beyond her normal life; Kitty is the one who kickstarts the deviation to a new book club; Maryellen has the roughest exterior; Slick is devoutly religious, but loyal to her friends; and Grace is the chin up, trying to be the dutiful housewife, but obviously has a little “naughtiness” in her to even pal around with the aforementioned.

Not too long into the book, Hendrix ups the intensity when a recluse neighbor attacks Patricia, who is our main protagonist, and bites her earlobe off. I was shocked something so drastic happened that early in the book. But it’s the first sign that something is off about the supposedly safe, Southern town they live in, where they thought they could keep their doors unlocked and let their children play until suppertime.

What I also love about Hendrix’s approach to the book is that he took a decidedly, intentional deviation from his prior book, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, set during the height of the Satanic panic in the 1980s. At least, I interpret the book that way. Hendrix said he wanted to write a book from the parents’ perspective of what to do when your children are in danger. However, without having read the other book yet, I see this as an inversion of the Satanic panic. With the Satanic panic, everyone was paranoid, and importantly, the paranoia was accepted and acted upon. Whereas with this book, particularly through Patricia’s eyes in trying to convince her fellow book club members and their respective husbands, she’s on an island with her paranoia. Nobody believes her besides perhaps Mrs. Greene, an African American woman living off in the trailer park on the outskirts of the town, so much so, I don’t see it on the map provided at the end of the book of the town, which could be the point. But even Greene is frustrated because it’s like, now you want to pay attention? In fact, an earlier version of Harris’ time as a vampire is relayed where he blames his children’s-bloodsucking ways on an African American male, and it being the early 20th century, the Southerners had no problem going along with it, killing said man and burying his body under a peach tree, hence the cover of the book. (Maybe reading into it, but from a structural racism standpoint, perhaps we were the bloodsuckers all along?)

In fact, Patricia is so on an island with what’s happening, that not even the death of her husband, Carter’s, mother, Mrs. Mary, is able to ameliorate people’s incredulity, including his. In a scene inspired by the actual book, Dracula, Harris summons disgusting creatures, like rats, to do his bidding; he wants to stop Mrs. Mary because she has a damning photograph of him unaged from 1928. The rats overwhelm Patricia’s house where the ailing Mrs. Mary is with Greene as her caretaker, nearly killing Greene and the family dog, but absolutely gnawing and slicing Mrs. Mary to death. That scene made my skin crawl and itch. Horrifying imagery by Hendrix. That and another scene I’ll talk about shortly will stick with me more than anything Harris directly does himself.

Even having witnessed Harris assaulting a African American girl, nobody believes Patricia. But it also plays into the larger socioeconomic and racial point Hendrix is making with the novel because instead of acting on the clear harm done to the girl by an outsider, the police and the system, take the girl away from the mother. And it should be noted, the police are more likely to take the word of Carter over Patricia because he’s the husband. Speaking of him, I’m not sure I’ve hated a character more viscerally in a book in years than the hatred I possessed for Carter. At every turn, he was the chauvinistic, I-am-the-man-of-the-house type, belittling and downplaying his own wife to other people, and especially in front of her own children. He was a loathsome figure and only got worse as the book went along. He made Patricia admit to making up accusations against Harris in front of Harris himself at their kitchen table with the children watching. I hated him. Fed up with nobody believing her, Patricia attempted suicide with pills. Carter, unwittingly through the machinations of of Harris, thus, turned Patricia’s own children, Korey and Blue (who I’d be remiss in not mentioning was utterly fascinated with Nazis, Hendrix repeatedly reminds us, and to what end, I’m not quite sure), against her. There can’t be a worse feeling as a mom than that. As I believe Maryellen reminds the moms, you love your children, but you don’t have to like them, and so, it holds, they don’t have to like you either, but losing their respect and by extension, their love, that’s devastating.

With all of that working against Patricia, after a three-year time jump, she’s trying to just go along to get along. In fact, Harris has made the entire town rich, further ingratiating himself to the husbands of the book club members and ensuring everyone’s acquiescence. That is, until Patricia starts breaking with the pack and façade again. In another horrifying, skin-crawling scene, Patricia and Greene use the cleaning service Greene’s with to search around Harris’ house for any evidence of his … monstrous ways (they’re learning from the true crime books that serial killers like souvenirs, or trophies, from their kills!). Patricia finds the dead body of a girl who went missing years prior in Harris’ attic, but Harris returns to the home and tries to find Patricia in the attic. She’s able to evade capture by hiding herself under old clothes with cockroach eggs and mice, and while a cockroach literally tries to burrow into her ear. Yuck. I’m not remotely doing the scene justice, but it was intense, suffice it to say.

Eventually, the five book club members come together to realize, despite them just being “ordinary housewives,” they can and must take on Harris. Of course, this also puts a bee in Greene’s bonnet, rightly, and expands upon Hendrix’s socioeconomic and racial theme because the white Southern women only started truly paying attention and acting once it was white kids being attacked or threatened, like Slick’s children and most specifically, Korey. (That scene where Patricia comes in on Harris sucking at Korey’s underaged thigh was horrifying. I couldn’t believe it was actually happening, perhaps similarly to how Patricia was feeling.) When it was the African American children, it was thought to leave well enough alone and let those parents deal with it. Whelp. Structural racism ends up hurting us all for that very reason.

In the end, the “ordinary housewives” are able to go the distance and do what needs to be done against Harris, including Grace, who was the most skeptical of all the book club members, but I loved what Hendrix did with her. She came in at the end after Harris was chopped to bits, and was vital to cleaning up their bloody tracks at Harris’ house because she’s a good house cleaner. (Early on in the book, to try to assuage Patricia’s concerns, she recommends Patricia go home and vacuum her drapes; she was being 100 percent earnest, but it was hilarious.)

This was one of the most satisfying books I’ve read in quite some time because it checks off all of my favorite boxes: a.) something extraordinary happening to normal people (vampires against moms); b.) put in the context of sexism in the 1980s and 1990s of the perceived uselessness of housewives, which felt particularly poignant coming off of having read Lessons in Chemistry a couple weeks ago; c.) socioeconomic and racial commentary that is not ham-fisted and makes sense with the story; and d.) c’mon, is there anything book-lovers love more than reading about and/or participating in a book club, and one that talks about true crime? Heck, Patricia learned what she needed and had her red flags primed to wave precisely because she was an avid true crime junkie! Way to go, girl!

Hendrix’s book was humorous, bold with its ambition, nerve-racking to the point of inducing skin itchiness, with a fast-pace, rich characters, believable dialogue, and a formidable gaslighting, monstrous vampire, albeit it, naturally, the worst villains were the normal male humans, which all made for a great Sunday read. I can’t recommend The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires enough. If you’re looking at the cover alone, whatever you’re thinking the book is about, Hendrix has so much more to offer than you can possibly imagine.