Kai Spellmeier's Reviews > The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

People's refusal to see sexism and harmful representation when it looks them straight in the face is what led this book to have such great reviews. Some even applaud the (male) author for being so good at writing female characters and I sit here flabbergasted, trying make my brain comprehend how they came to that conclusion.

Let's get the obvious out of the way: I'm a white man - and so is the author. Pick your fighter. I'm stating how I perceived the book and as someone who is super keen to read books by authors (preferably OwnVoices) that care about good representation, this one fell awfully flat. Did a big ugly noise when it landed, too.

I was so excited to read it. The title tells you everything you need to know about the book and the cover is gorgeous. It's a quick read and I finished it in less than a day (mostly because I wanted to get it over with and didn't want to have to pick it up again the next day). But honestly, the first 200 pages or so were decent. I enjoyed myself. I noticed that the Black characters in the book were only ever unnamed waiters or caregivers without speaking roles and it felt iffy, but I was ready to give the author the benefit of the doubt. He still had a lot of pages to turn things around.

I guess what's helpful to know is that the book is set in America's Deep South in the 80's and 90's. But the author took that as an excuse to push Black characters to the sidelines. Mrs Greene, a Black woman hired to take care of the main character's mother, eventually becomes part of the vampire slaying book club, but the white saviour narrative displayed in the book is still tasteless. To add insult to injury, it seems like the evil vampire is also a racist one because he only ever murders Black people. And this leads us to another role that Black characters had in the novel: to be killed. Either through lynchings or through the hands of the vampire. And of course all Black people in the book lived in a poor settlement where the female white main characters had to be scared to walk the streets. Now you can cry "BUT historical accuracy!" but honestly, there's a vampire in this book, so your argument is invalid. If a vampire is more realistic than a Black person with a degree or a nice suburban house, there's definitely something wrong.

I could probably say more but one of the reasons why I was so attentive when it came to the representation was Mikki Kendall's Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot, which was the last book I read before I picked this one up. While the two books aren't at all related, Mikki Kendall's essays about structural racism, privilege, white feminism, etc. made a stark contrast to this Vampire slaying book. So I guess what I'm saying is, if you're still debating reading The Southern Book Club's Guide to Vampire Slaying, consider picking up Hood Feminism instead.

I do want to talk about the presentation of the female characters though. I've seen a few reviewers call the characters one dimensional and crude, which is accurate. I guess the more I read, the less willing I was to let things slide and soon both plot and characters completely deteriorated. None of these fictional women seemed to be able to pick a husband that isn't a dick, none of them gave a damn about female friendships and they acted irrationally around their children, too. I'm not advocating for female characters to be respectable so they can be called feminist. That's not how it works. But when you intend to write good rep and this is all you come up with, then that's not exactly what I would call fully fleshed complex female characters. But of course, this male horror author had to go one step further. Of course he had to make unnecessary comments about their breasts and pubes, of course horror wouldn't be horror if female characters didn't experience physical violation of their bodies in the form of rape and abuse. No, your book is not feminist just because your female characters say "That's sexist" once. I'm really tired of horror authors relying on tropes like the violation of women's bodies (and Nazi symbolism, just to throw that in too) to create discomfort. It's like comedians that can only be "funny" when they ridicule women and marginalised people.

Oh one thing I'd like to add: this, let's call it "shortcoming" is not just the author's fault. We tend to forget that behind a published book there's a team of editors, there's a publisher that decided to give the book a nice cover and release it the way it was. It's this whole industry that needs to do better, that needs to check their priorities and their privilege. Or else we'll get more questionable books like this.

At the end of the day there was no room left for any shred of patience on my part, which is why I'm giving this a really bitter rating of one star.