Trigger warning: Rape and lynching
When a book won’t stop turning over and over in my brain it’s a great book to me. When I finished this last night I went and re-read some of my favorite parts. Thought again about some of the characters and the things that they went through. I had a lot of emotions while reading this one, frustration, irritation, sympathy, then disgust, and then anger. This book takes you through it paces. It has a lot of gore in it (which may be too much for some readers) and a lot of ugly things that this book shows you. The ugliness of men for one. The ugliness of what it means to be a black woman or child living in the south. If some of these people had been real I would have been shaking them during different parts of this book. What I think though is that this book shows that the vampire in this book though a terrible person/thing was not the only terrible thing lurking in these pages.
“The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires” follows housewife Patricia Campbell. Patricia is starting to feel unsettled with her life. Though she is married to her husband Carter and they have two beautiful kids, Korey and Blue, she starts to wonder about the path she did not take (she stopped being a nurse to get married). Patricia’s life though changes for the better (slightly) after she and a few of the women form a renegade book club. Patricia now looks forward to getting together with these women (Kitty, Grace, Slick, and Maryellen) and finds that true crime books are their favorites. One night though, Patricia is attacked by an elderly neighbor. The woman’s nephew has moved into her home and Patricia feels a connection to this man named James. Patricia though starts to feel that something is off with James. Her mother in law, Miss Mary keeps insisting that he is a man she once knew as Hoyt. And then there seems to be someone stalking their home. Patricia does what any good book reader would do, she does research and starts to wonder if James is a vampire.
So, let’s get this out of the way. Most of the readers are not going to like Patricia. I wanted to shake her a couple dozen times throughout this book. I then felt sorry for her when I woke up this morning. I think it’s because Hendrix does a good job of showing how Patricia got smaller and smaller due to how her husband Carter treated her. I know a lot of readers though that a woman in the 90s (the book’s setting) would never have been so cowed by their husband, or let a stranger manipulate them as badly as James manipulates Patricia, but it’s 2022 and I see this type of stuff still happening. I think that a lot of women would like to say that in 2022 they would never be duped, but you have people thinking eating horse paste is a cure for COVID-19 so……yeah. What happens to Patricia throughout this book from when she first meets James, to three years later…it does make your head spin.
The men in this book (the husbands) are their own sort of monsters. Men who seem to be doing a lot of things that the wives know about, but who want to be seen as “above” them, in charge of the home. There’s a terrible scene between all of the wives and husband that made me go [expletive] this.
The wives though, I can see why they formed a bond. But you also feel a little disgust with them for backing down on what they knew and to just allow the black children and women who were going missing become someone else’s problem. How do you cheer them on in the end when you know they only were forced to move once the intentions of the monster in their midst became a reality and a present danger for them?
Now I will shift to the character of Mrs. Greene. Readers get to know her because she was helping take care of Patricia’s mother in law. And then when Mrs. Greene admitted something was taking or harming the children of Six Mile (black kids) and she hoped that Grace and Patricia would really be able to help. I know some readers didn’t like her and thought she was a magical negro trope, but I firmly disagree. Though I would have loved the story told from her POV, she was firmly a black woman who was going to keep her kids safe and was disgusted by the white women of Old Village, South Carolina.
The writing at times may make you ill, there are some very graphic scenes and a lot of gore to wade through. A friend of mine likened this to Salem’s Lot and she’s right. This is the vampire of the dark and not the Twilight version. The flow got better after I got past the 10 percent mark. Then I could not put the book down. I kept shrieking internally as I was reading and wanting Patricia to make better choices already. I also liked how the reading material the book club is doing ties into parts of the book. I laughed at the disdain of them for “Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars.” My mom had that book on her shelf and I remember I snuck a peek and put that thing back in like 5 minutes.
The setting of this book in Old Village, South Caroline in the 90s felt very real to me. I did not grow up in the south, but i did grow up in a small town that sounded similar to this. Our families all knew each other, and our activities seemed set around the church and holidays. And of course when my brothers got older, high school football and basketball games. But one thing I realized is that women like my mother were definitely focused on their families and children. I didn’t even know until I was much older how my mother went to one year of college and dropped out, she met my dad, got married, and immediately started having kids. She once said to me she would have liked to have been a writer. I know now we have women finally saying that hey, you really can’t have it all, you can have this and that, but having it all means different things, and giving up different things, and sometimes you are going to be frustrated.
The ending was a gut punch I though. I did love the bonus material that came with my version of this book. Getting to see a map of Old Village, the book club reading lists, etc.
