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Quirk Books

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

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Format: Hardcover


Description

“This funny and fresh take on a classic tale manages to comment on gender roles, racial disparities, and white privilege all while creeping me all the way out. So good.”—Zakiya Dalila Harris, author of The Other Black GirlSteel Magnolias meets Dracula in this New York Times best-selling horror novel about a women's book club that must do battle with a mysterious newcomer to their small Southern town. 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. Read more


Publisher ‏ : ‎ Quirk Books (April 7, 2020)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 408 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1683691431


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 33


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.4 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.34 x 1.32 x 9.31 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #18,856 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #22 in Vampire Horror #46 in Vampire Thrillers #393 in Serial Killer Thrillers


#22 in Vampire Horror:


#46 in Vampire Thrillers:


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • Not what I expected
Based off the title I expected a much different book. I was pleasantly surprised! Sometimes I felt the characters were odd but then thought maybe that was purposeful. All in all I enjoyed it
Reviewed in the United States on December 23, 2022 by Holli Kleeb
    • Great conceit, too bad there isn't a single tolerable character in it.
"Sometimes she craved a little danger. And that was why she had book club." Sometimes, I have complex, layered reasons for picking up a particular book. Not so with Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Vampire Slaying. I mean, take a look at that title! Who could resist? I’d just come off of a marathon reading session of challenging reads and I wanted light, engaging fare. It’s safe to say that my expectations were pretty high and my standards low. This book’s got everything I want in a vacation read, and early reviews teed it up to be the golf equivalent of a slam dunk. I was entirely unprepared to hate this book. When I first saw this book advertised before its publication, I was instantly and indelibly reminded of two things that I love: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a text post from years and years back about a post-apoc video game wherein you fought as a ’50s housewife complete with tea dress, gloves, and pearls. If you haven’t seen either of these, stop now and investigate. I’ll be here when you come back. Those images in mind, and a vague notion of sticky, hot summers depicted in movies and tv, I poured myself an actual lemonade and kicked back to bury myself in what was sure to be an enjoyable book. And truth be told aspects of this book are fantastic. Hendrix has done some really cool things in building and exploring this narrative, and they are absolutely worth exploring. Really, as far as I’m concerned the book has only one fatal flaw. There isn’t a single tolerable character in its 404 pages. And honestly, there isn’t all that much to say about that. At no point could I connect with, relate to, support, or tolerate reading about any of the characters – either because they were intolerable people or because they received no characterization. There was no in-between. There were no outliers. While I think it’s probably enough to say that I hated all of the other characters, and leave it at that, I feel duty-bound to explain some of what I disliked about the main character, Patricia. Because she did break this book for me, and with just a couple of simple qualities. 15 pages into The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Vampire Slaying, I made the following note: "I’m just not sure I can drum up a whole book’s worth of sympathy (or patience) for the 'oh, woe is me – for things in the house need doing and I’m too weak and female to ask for help with the housework' crowd." That’s perhaps not the most charitable of descriptions, but as this book churned on page after page after page, it turned out that I really didn’t have that much sympathy or patience to give to a woman who was simultaneously this self-defeating and this certain that she was in the right. It’s not that I don’t understand that many women shoulder the main burden of housework, or that they struggle to ask their partners for meaningful help. I’ve been that woman. I get it. And it’s not that it’s all that intolerable to watch a character make dumb decision after dumb decision and not learn from it. It’s that she did it all with this doe-eyed self-centeredness, and that we had to be right there with her the entire time because she was our main character. And that’s kind of that, really. Patricia broke me. However, Hendrix did do some cool things that are totally worth celebrating. There’s not a lot about a vampire story, even a modern urban vampire story that hasn’t been done before, and Hendrix did something really novel in setting his vampire story not against any old southern backdrop but a modern suburban backdrop. He then could use the clearly defined elements of the setting to juxtapose the real and the unreal, the mundane and the supernatural, and simultaneously play fast and loose with the traditions we all know (whether we love them or not) from the vampire mythos. And play he does. It’s a delicious concept and very well framed. Adding to this the specific way he centers his story and particularly Patricia’s attention around the book club really brings weight to this story. It feels very modern, offering Hendrix his best opportunities for highlighting through contrast the otherworldliness of the undead element. And if there had been any characters to speak of this is where they really would have shone. Instead, out of the vacuum where characters could have been, shines one very amusing bright light: Hendrix’ frequent references to literature. The conceit of using the books the Book Club is reading to frame the evolving narrative seems like it might be a simple technique that offers a couple of cutesy moments, or a chintzy gimmick to put a spin on a pretty tropey narrative tradition. But Hendrix positively nails it, and if I hadn’t absolutely loathed the main character Patricia this one aspect alone is so strong it would have saved this book in my eyes. Also of note, I think, is an oft-overlooked detail. A huge amount of care was put into the design of this physical book, and it is absolutely lovely to behold. What makes this baffling is the astonishing amount of flat-out errors in the book. Sentences that were clearly only half-edited (like a “reconsidered” floating in the middle of a statement that includes nothing to reconsider), and multiple continuity errors (like a fascinating multi-page dance about a stolen item where the item goes back and forth from “stolen” to “left at home” a dizzying number of times). I stopped counting after I’d noted 10 egregious errors. We’re all human. We all make mistakes. But for a book that was this carefully put together, I found these errors to be really astonishing. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2020 by Ardis Louise Ramey
    • Amazing!!!
I love everything about this book. It’s written so well and the characters are so personable and relatable that I felt like I was actually there. I’ve recommend this book who love dark topics of classes, gender roles and or a woman hero or love seeing women empowered. This is one of my top 10 books for sure ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2022 by Radiance
    • A book about motherhood, vampires, friendship, and serial killers
Though he’s regarded by some as drenched in irony and snark, I’ve never found Grady Hendrix’s forays into horror to be less than great, embracing all sorts of horror tropes with the ease of an expert, all while finding some way to marry the themes of the horror to something larger – the dangers of defining yourself by your work in Horrorstör, for instance, or the way that we grow apart from our friends as filtered through demonic possession in My Best Friend’s Exorcism. And in Hendrix’s hands, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires turns from a typical vampire novel a la Salem’s Lot (mysterious stranger comes to small town, etc.) into an exploration of motherhood and what it’s like to try to find your way through parenting when you can’t even find time for yourself. That metaphor isn’t quite as tight as usual for Hendrix, which both frees up the book to go in different directions but also makes it a little looser in terms of structure, with some odd beats that never quite feel tied into the novel. (I can’t help but feel there was more to the story of our main character’s son than ended up in the final version of the story, where it simply feels disquieting but also unresolved.) But the result is a pretty fun tale about a group of suburban women who start bonding after they start a book club that’s less pretentious than the “official” one, becoming tight friends and each other’s lifelines when life is hard. And when a young man named James Harris moves in down the street, as good Southern women, they want to reach out, but, well, he’s never that active during the day, and the windows are darkened… Hendrix nicely leans into the dramatic irony brought about by the name of the book, letting the reader be aware of what’s going on well before the main characters, but that doesn’t stop him from taking the idea of vampires into far more unexpected territory, as Harris both plays to the desire for money by the men folk and the willingness of a small town to overlook crimes happening in the Black neighborhoods of the city. Indeed, if there’s another central conceit to the novel beyond the motherhood one, it’s the reframing of the vampire not as the romantic Count Dracula, but as the wandering serial killer, one without ties, human morality, or any connection to the world around him, and in doing so, Hendrix gives us a vampire that’s both true to our ideas of the creature and yet doesn’t remind us of anyone but himself – a hard thing to do in vampire fiction these days. I really enjoyed Book Club a lot; yes, the book isn’t quite as thematically tight as Hendrix’s other works, but it gains from the way that that looseness allows Hendrix to take the plot into ways that examine classism, sexism, racism, parenting, suburbia, and more, all while never forgetting that he’s delivering a horror novel and has to bring the goods on that front. And he definitely does here, with a few knockout sequences that show that there’s more to Hendrix than the unfair labels that have been put on him by some. For my money, Hendrix is four for four, and Book Club is just further proof that he’s not just a lover of pulp horrors, but a solid writer for any horror fan to enjoy. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2021 by Josh Mauthe

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