Lisa Lynch's Reviews > The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

I really enjoyed the first 1/3 of Grady Hendrix's The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires. It does a great job of setting up our cast of southern mothers who live these complacent, boring lives and decide to spice it up by organizing a book club that reads a mix of murder mysteries, romance, and thrillers.

Then this dude comes to town and, because we all know the title of this book, its pretty easy to guess where things go from there. Let's just say things are about get very spicy indeed.

A lot of people love this book.

I'm not one of those people.

I actually found much of this book to be so problematic that it makes me feel part flabbergasted and part infuriated at the whole thing. I'm just not seeing what so many people like about this book and my head is spinning trying to wrap itself around what I’ve just read, so I will discuss my problems with this book with the utilization of a numbered list.

1. The title is misleading. They got the Southern Book Club part right, but if you go into this book thinking that multiple vampires will be slain by said book club, you will be disappointed. Not only do most of the book club members not even believe there is a vampire in town for at least 80% of the book, but notice that I said “vampire” and not “vampires”. Also, in no way is this book a “guide” to anything, so I feel the title was chosen to be literary and cool and catchy.

2. This book is boring. This may be the least criminal offense that The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires commits, but its a big one nonetheless. I actually get a lot of entertainment value from bad books, so, to me, it is FAR worse for a book to be boring than bad. I really, really liked the first 1/3 of the book, but the middle and most of the events that lead up to the ending were a drag. My mind wandered while reading this one and it was such a struggle to continue. If I had been reading a physical book, there is a good chance I would have DNFd this one.

3. I felt that Hendrix wanted me, as a reader, to be as complacent as the characters in the book about the misogyny, racism, and sexism that permeated the entirety of the text. The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires is set in the deep American south during the 80's - 90's and is very much a reflection of that time. Unfortunately, this book doesn't exactly acknowledge these things as problems, so it feels very much stuck in the past, but not because it can't see what is wrong. It sees what is wrong and chooses to accept it.

Like, it feels that the community our book club lives in is perfectly fine being racist. The women are perfectly fine with being treated poorly by their husbands and are perfectly content to live repressed lives in order to conform to the stereotypical gender roles that their husbands want them to be in. Our protagonist ends the pursuit of a career as a nurse in favor of marrying a doctor who can take care of her. I get and respect that some people are ok with this kind of thing, but I just wanted ONE SINGLE CHARACTER to challenge the stereotypes presented in this book. None of them do.

And I get that a lot of this book is supposed to be satire. Satire can be a wonderful tool to expose and criticize things like misogyny, racism, and sexism but I didn't feel that Hendrix was being critical with these characters or with this story all all. Instead, he put all of these things on display and just leaves them hanging there for us to gawk at. And yeah, ok fine. BUT... can satire truly be effective when it doesn't challenge and, instead, perpetuates the awfully negative stereotypes it is supposed to contradict?

In my opinion, no. So this book didn't work for me as satire because Hendrix is only exposing a problem... a problem that the characters in the book seem to be ok with existing or having existed. I really wanted there to be more critique here, but there just wasn't.


4. The tone is wildly inconsistent. Speaking of satire... The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires tries to be funny. None of it felt funny to me.

There is an artful way to weave comedic satire with heavy topics like racism, misogyny, and sexism, but Hendrix just didn't quite get there imho. I do respect the guy for the attempt, but man, I expected this to be so much better than it was.

I think a large part of why the satire didn't quite work for me was because the humor in this book fell so flat. And then there were some absurd, gory horror moments that felt cheesy and silly and ridiculous. It just didn't work for me.


5. The characters are underdeveloped and unlikable. Patricia is our protagonist and she just annoyed the hell out of me, which actually wasn't my biggest problem with this book. My biggest problem was that I absolutely could not distinguish any of the other book club members from each other. One was named Marry Ellen I think. And one was called.... um... Slash? Slade? (Let me look this up...) Ok, it was Slick. And apparently there was also a Grace and a Kitty and I do remember the names now, but I could not tell you anything about any of these ladies.

Actually, that's a lie. I can tell you that all of these ladies have terrible husbands and are, generally, just not treated well by men. All the men in this book gaslight the fuck out of all the women to the point where it is not just absurd, but horribly sad as well. All of these women don't seem to value themselves or their relationships with other women. All of them act stupid in the worst way and are foolish with their behavior around their children. All of them just casually accept their place at the bottom of the societal and familial totem pole without question or even, seemingly, a desire to change that position.

I'm just so disappointed at the lack of strong female characters in this book that pretends to be about just that. Honestly, the only one out of the lot that I liked was Mrs. Greene, the woman who is hired to care for Patricia's mother in law.


6. Mrs. Greene's character is treated so poorly it is disgusting. Nobody can convince me that Mrs. Greene isn't the true hero of this story. First of all, she had the most likable personality and the most sense out of all the women in this book. Second of all, Mrs. Green is the one who steps up and does all the dirty work at the end while Patricia is basically out of the picture.

Despite her heroism, I'm kind of appalled at how stereotypical her situation is. We only meet Mrs. Greene because she is hired to care for Patricia's elderly mother-in-law. (Btw, I do not think any of the white ladies in this book would be friends with a POC if it wasn't a paid relationship.) Mrs. Green is a black, single mother, so of course she lives in the slums. Of course she works as a housemaid for a bunch of white families SOME OF WHO ARE MEMBERS OF THE BOOK CLUB! Of course she is wrongfully accused of a crime and her kids are taken away from her. And, to add insult to injury, Mrs. Green is the one who brings it to Patricia's attention that a bunch of black children are being murdered because, of course, the white communities don't notice.

And Patricia makes the smallest attempt to get her husband to help Mrs. Greene when her kids are wrongfully taken, but he won't for political reasons, all of which have to do with Mrs. Green being black and not exactly worth the trouble. So instead of doing something herself to help the woman who helped her family, Patricia turns a blind eye. Disgusting! And it just stings all the much more when Mrs. Green steps up is the most heroic at the end of the book.

The display of racism in this book is so problematic, and I just wish this book had something powerful to say about all of this, but as it is, it just perpetuates negative stereotypes.


7. I didn't like how this male author wrote women. I read several reviews that mentioned how "real" these characters are because they are mothers who prepare sandwiches ahead of time to throw in packed school lunches and because they find comfort in vacuuming the curtains and doing the “womanly duties” of cooking, laundry, cleaning, and child rearing. And I'm just like "uh... ok". I do see this point to some extent, but again, why are we perpetuating these negative stereotypes??

Why can’t these women like being housewives and also be badasses who stand up to their misogynistic husbands, challenge local racism, and promote and encourage other women to step outside traditional gender roles if they so choose?? I don’t even need all of them to do it, just one would have been nice. Instead, when a lot of these ladies actually do something, it felt disingenuous and unbelievable because their characters are so content to be complacent.

And yeah, the whole point of the book is that these women do eventually come together to fight for what they think is right. But let me make it clear that the “right thing” they decide to fight for is killing the local vampire, not fighting to bridge the gap in inequalities and injustices of their community. Yes, getting rid of a vampire that is murdering black children should be a priority, but it only really becomes worthy of the book club’s energy when the vamp starts going after Patricia’s kids. Who, don’t forget, are white.

And I swear to god this book mentions at the end how they couldn't have done what they did without [insert book club member's name]'s ability to clean so well, [insert book club member's name]'s ability to use a knife, and on and on. I get that we should appreciate our individual skill sets, but these woman are only good at these skills because they live in a patriarchal society where that is what they are expected to like to do well as women.

Hendrix may have attempted to write strong, female characters who embrace their duties as a woman while being a badass, but he totally forgot the badass part. The book club women don't even really know that there is a vampire in their midst (because its mostly black kids who are dying and who care about them, right ladies?) for most of the book.

To top it all off, Hendrix creates a villain who charms all these women with his good looks and money and smooth manipulation tactics. And of course, all the horror elements are over-sexualized and Hendrix comments on women's breasts and pubes all the times. There are a total of 4 rapes in this book that either happen or are mentioned. And the rape and physical violation of women is handled with the same attitude of complacency that everything else in this book is infected with.


8. The ending is terrible. I promise I won’t spoil it. But just let me say that Patricia needs to, literally, put on a sexy dress to execute her plan to get rid of the local vampire. What the fuck???




Thus concludes my numbered list.


I guess I should mention the good things about this book, but I'm going to make it brief. I enjoyed the writing and the dialogue. I also thought it was a good story, albeit executed poorly. Oh, and I enjoyed how the sections were broken down by what book they were reading that month. And some of the horror elements were pretty cool and well written. And that's all folks!

I found the mishandling of contradictory themes and characters in this book to be much more horrifying than the actual vampire. And there just should be some kind of authorial penalty for this.

So anyway, I didn't like this book. I'm in the minority, so maybe there really is something here I missed... or maybe that pervasive sense of complacency is more powerful that I had imagined.

I rated The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix 2 out of 5 stars.

I am going to refrain from recommending this one.