Book Description:

“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.”

I am not typically someone who reads a lot of horror novels. I can be a little bit squeamish. But I picked up this novel from my local library and I was shocked by how much I loved it. To be clear, this is not a paid review and there are no affiliate links in this post. This is just my opinion. If you are here, please be prepared for spoilers (this is going to be somewhat in-depth) and if you haven’t read the book, please bookmark this page and come back to this post after you have.

Okay, so while I have not read many straight up horror novels, I have read lots of books about vampires. Which I guess counts as horror but .. maybe horror-lite? I did read Bram Stoker’s Dracula when I was a teenager and the book was both too intense and too boring for me at that time. It went on and on about details that felt unnecessary and lulled you into a sense of comfort only to be ripped out of by some horrible scene about bugs and other things that I couldn’t handle. Now that I’m all grown up (I’m in my 30s), I do actually enjoy some horror films and books. I don’t typically like books where children are harmed or where violence is gratuitous. There is both sexual violence and harm to children in this novel, so be warned. I have read lots and lots of true crime. Some of it is awful and feels like a bizarre way to worship the evil-doer and some of it is focused on the victims and their lives and how one wrong turn of events changed everything. Perhaps you can guess which one makes me want to vomit in the back of my mouth. I had some concerns about this book because of the whole “children on the other side of town go missing” part. I was worried about how in-depth the descriptions would be and while we have good reason to believe that the person doing the killing is a vampire (based off the title alone), I didn’t want to stumble into anything that would make me feel sick for weeks. Thankfully, for this book, it did have some sickening attack scenes but it isn’t going to make you scarred for life like IT or other horror novels/books that I’ve been actively avoiding for years. Is the death of children mentioned? Yes. Is it glorified? No. Do we watch in real time as harm is being done to children? Yes, on two occasions, although the children don’t end up dying in those particular scenes. And those scenes are absolutely necessary for the story to go on. So, while the scenes are definitely upsetting and horrible, it didn’t cross the “this book is unreadable” line for me.

This book is ripe for devouring and I spent four days staying up until the wee hours of the morning until my eyes gave out reading it. It is the exact type of book that I would love to see translated into a movie or a mini-series.

Let’s talk about the characters.

Patricia, the main character, spends a lot of time cleaning her house and reading novels. She prides herself on being a very practical person. At the start of the book, she is trying to fit in with the socialites in Charleston who are reading “worthy” and “noble” books. These books bore Patricia and she struggles to get through them. But she meets Kitty, a neighbor who is a lot more comfortable getting real about what she wants out of life. She invites her to a new book club all about true crime novels and they dive in together. Patricia, Kitty, Slick, Grace, and Maryellen. They are all a little bit of a different flavor of middle-aged woman and all are very endearing and quirky with their own faults. There is Grace who believes she is above it all (above what? Everything. This woman is above it all), Slick who is fiercely religious and a little out there, Kitty who struggles to make ends meet and has multiple children who she fights tooth and nail for (even if it is against her own husband trying to keep him from gambling away their children’s college funds), Maryellen who is married to a police officer and is somewhat meek but sometimes headstrong. All of them have complicated relationships with their husbands, their duties as mothers, and their positions in society. Patricia has two children, Korey and Blue (aka Carter Jr.,) with her husband Carter who is a psychiatrist. When the book club begins, the women start to devour true crime novels at a break-neck speed. Oh, and I should mention that while this book was published in 2020, it takes place in the 1990s. This is actually a vital detail and part of the reason why Hendrix is so successful in telling this story. It is a nostalgic time period for me, for sure, but the lack of technology (and the pressure of emerging technology) is a driving plot point in the story.

The husbands of these particular women are upsetting to say the least. Carter seems like he is trying to be a supportive husband in some ways. He doesn’t pay much attention to Patricia and doesn’t go out of his way for her, but he is nice enough at first. He at least seems to care about her. When Patricia starts to go down the rabbit hole that is James Harris, he actively discourages her and decides she is crazy. He involuntarily hospitalizes her, he makes her take Prozac, and he dismisses her concerns constantly. He also openly chastises her ability as a parent on multiple occasions which made me really, really hate him. In some ways, Carter represents everything that was going wrong in the 90s to lead to some of the issues that we have today. Like how he loves to over-prescribe for his patients because he’s being actively paid off by drug companies to do so. He works constantly and even though his wife is at home TERRIFIED after she is brutally attacked, he still doesn’t come home when he promises that he will. And he takes work trips that are often just to meet younger women and have affairs. So… yes, Carter is the most punchable person in this book. While Carter does kind of get his just desserts at the end of the books, he also kind of gets away with everything. This is both realistic and frustrating.

All of the husbands have their own issues. Honestly, I kind of hated all of them and I have to believe it was intentional. All of these women are put into situations where they feel powerless in their daily lives. Grace, who copes with her husband’s physical abuse by putting on an unshakeable exterior and keeps her home pristine, is both frustrating and pitiable. Her husband is obviously awful because he beats her. Kitty’s husband loves her but he keeps spending all their money and Kitty has to sell her heirlooms to keep the lights on and eventually they start chopping up the family farm to be able to survive. Maryellen and her husband love each other but it is revealed that he assaulted an 11-year-old child and had to be moved to Charleston because of it and the police department tried to cover it up. And Slick whose husband does seem to care about her, but he is also extremely controlling and very religious. And James Harris claims that all of them are cheating anyway. We have other evidence from Patricia that Carter was cheating but whether they all were is kind of unclear. Either way, none of them are winning any awards for their behavior as husbands.

Miss Mary is Carter’s mother, who is also an important part of the story. She is an old woman whose mind is going and she really struggles to do day-to-day tasks. Eventually, Patricia and Carter move her into their home and Patricia takes over caring for her full-time. When this becomes too much to handle, her book club friends send over Mrs. Greene, a woman from the nearby neighborhood of Six-Mile. Both of these women are extremely pivotal to the story and the unsung heroes of it all. Miss Mary ends up being the key that unlocks the whole mystery. Mrs. Greene is a black woman who has been cleaning homes for the more well-to-do folks in the neighborhood but is also willing to help take care of the older folks. She is kind but takes no shit and fights like hell for Miss Mary and the children of Six-Mile. The book wouldn’t work at all without these two characters because they force the women to have to break out of the social norms.

James Harris

Okay, so the title of this book tells us that this group of women are going to figure out how to slay vampires. The thing about James Harris is that he is, essentially, a vampire, but he’s also kind of this horrible monstrous thing that I haven’t seen described before. He does feed off of people’s blood but he also insists that he is one of a kind. That there are no others like him. I wasn’t entirely sure if he was a vampire or not. And it doesn’t seem like his goal is to turn everyone into vampires (like in Sinners) but he does come into town and manages to lure people into a false sense of security.

He is a very interesting character for a villain because while he is not human, we’ve all met or heard of humans like him. He wraps everyone around his finger and they trust him despite having every reason not to. In order to save face (or prevent embarrassment), the kind folks in the small southern town just go along with what he wants. He has a ton of money and starts waving it around and the book club women’s husbands eat it up as a reason to say that he’s everything he says he is. Because of southern hospitality and the ideals of being kind and helpful, the entire town kind of ends up eating right out of his hand. They just go along with it.

Except Patricia.

Patricia, in the book, compares him to other serial killers who get away with things for a long time because everyone is afraid to shake up the status-quo. They don’t want to make themselves uncomfortable by admitting that they might have trusted the wrong guy. Patricia is actually one of the first people in the book to really put herself out there and try to be friendly to James Harris. As a result, she invites him into her home. So, James does follow the vampire rule that they have to be invited in. Everything that comes after is a result of it and Patricia, at the end of the book, blames herself.

“You asked for this,” he tells her.

The reason why I say that he isn’t like a typical vampire is because he doesn’t have fangs. He has this odd insect-like appendage that protrudes from the bottom of his mouth (I couldn’t quite picture whether it comes up from underneath his tongue or what but suffice to say it is pretty gross). He climbs around on rooftops and the sun makes him weak and makes his eyes burn. He controls insects, rats, and other horrible things. Does he turn into a bat? Not that we see. Does he bite necks? No. He uses his odd appendage to stab victims in their upper inner thighs and drain them of blood. I think that it is this .. grotesque intimacy which protects him in a way. Everyone is so afraid to be outcast by society that they refuse to admit what he has done. They don’t want to accept it or talk about it. It’s uncomfortable and unsettling so they just push it away.

James targets the young children in the black community because he knows that the police won’t protect them nor look into it as hard. In this way, he also mirrors real-life predators who don’t go after victims that can fight back. Instead, he grooms and lures children who are vulnerable away from their place of safety into his literal white box van in the woods.

He also rapes Slick. This is apparently one of the parts of the book that was a deal breaker for a lot of people but if you look at everything else he does in the book, this is absolutely on-par. Not because I wanted to read about it, no.. it was actually horrible to read. The description of this event is truly… something else. But he does so because he knows she won’t say anything to her husband because Leland (Slick’s husband) wouldn’t believe her. He might not believe her that it wasn’t her fault. And what happens to Slick is the pivotal moment that leads to James’s demise because he believed he could get away with it. Just like so many other real serial killers.

James Harris is the exact type of monster that thrives when everyone is afraid to say something. Even though the book club women believe Patricia initially, when they initially try to bring it to their husband’s attention, they are met with a formidable wall. The men take his side. Because he has the money, the power, and the wives do not.

Steel Magnolias Vibes?

The book is described in a review as “Steel Magnolias meets Dracula” and I can see where they are coming from. There is a lot of humor mixed in with the horror in this book. And there were multiple times where I would read a quote out loud to my husband and he would look at me perplexed because without context they don’t quite hit the same way.

I’m going to share some of my favorite quotes here anyway and assume that you’ve read the book and these are just a lovely callback to these moments.

“‘You’d rather get stabbed forty-one times than ruin the curb appeal of your home?’ Maryellen asked.

‘Yes,’ Grace said.” (Chapter 3, page 43).

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“Sadness flooded her chest. She’d had a left earlobe all her life, and suddenly it was gone. She felt like a friend had died.” (Chapter 5, page 56).

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“She could already see this becoming a family story about what a terrible house she kept. ‘Remember?’ they would ask each other when they were older. ‘Remember how Mom’s house was so dirty a roach fell off the ceiling into Granny Mary’s glass? Remember that?'” (Chapter 7, page 72).

_______

“‘Marjorie Fretwell once sucked a copperhead up in her vacuum cleaner because she didn’t know what to do with it and then she had to throw the whole vacuum away,’ Kitty said, ‘Don’t talk to me about Marjorie Fretwell.'” (Chapter 13, page 138).

_______

“‘What does this one do?’ she asked about a button, and then pointed to a number at the top of the monitor. ‘Does this mean you’re winning? Look at your score, it’s so high.’

‘That’s the amount of damage I’ve taken,’ he said.” (Chapter 37, page 356).

_______

This book had so many unexpected funny moments that pulled me out of my anxiety for a moment (about what James was going to do next) and it was always so well done. As much as some of the women irritated me, I could understand them, and I wanted to be friends with them. And for every funny moment, there is a horrible one that matches it in its intensity with blood, some gore, and lots and lots of insects. If you’ve ever met some of the large and horrible insects that live in the south, you will appreciate just how disgusting some of these scenes are. Patricia literally squishes a cockroach INSIDE OF HER OWN EAR.

I think the humor is used expertly because it is so disarming. There are so many moments where you think you are safe because you’ve just been laughing along with the girls and then you are met with the face of a monster moments later.

The Scary Bits

The first attack happens pretty early on in the book. In fact, the quote from Chapter 5 happens pretty directly after the attack. Patricia goes to take out the garbage and finds something going through her trash. In a moment of sickening realization, she shines her flashlight on the assailants face and it is an old woman in her nightgown feasting on a raccoon. The woman attacks her, manages to rip off her earlobe, and she finds herself rolling around on the ground trying not to hurt this old woman but kinda needing to hurt her. Mrs. Savage is the woman’s name and it is her neighbor who she has known for a while. She has never known her to do this. Patricia’s pathetic husband happens to make it back home in time to pull the old woman off of her and they both go to the hospital. Mrs. Savage passes away in the hospital and poor Patty loses an earlobe for good. There is a detail where she refers to her by her first name, Ann, and if we skip forward to Mr. Harris’s final scene, he refers to one of his victims as Ann.

Because of course he was never Mrs. Savage’s nephew. He is four hundred years old. She was as much a victim as the rest of them. Just like the house cleaners he killed, the children who he led to killing themselves, as Slick who he tormented for months before she finally died. But that first attack scene sets so much of the tone for the book. It is so good. And it made me take my garbage out well before dark that is for certain.

Some of the scenes in this book go on for a while and actually go further than you think they will. The scene where Slick recounts the rape to Patricia doesn’t end there because she has to deal with the… aftermath. It’s an odd mix of emotions in that scene because on one hand, I admired how quickly Patricia was there to help Slick (who had previously betrayed her) and how ready she was to deal with the carnage. She didn’t abandon her even though it was pretty awful. On the other hand, I was so repulsed by James Harris and by what was happening and there was so much going on in one moment. Leland trying to get in and see what was wrong but Patricia keeping him out because Slick knew that he couldn’t deal with it. In the end, it was Patricia and Kitty who were religious about visiting Slick in her final days and not her husband. It was awful but it also showed the lengths that these women would go for each other. And I do know many women like that. Women that will step in even when they are repulsed to help each other and take care of each other. It is in these moments that we see the best of the characters, even though it is in the worst circumstances.

I think that is why this book isn’t like… “scary.” It isn’t jump-scare in your face when you think you are watching a car advertisement. It somehow feels very grounded even in the most “horror” of horror moments in the book. But all the elements for a scary summer read are there and it is just so good.

Men Writing Women

I had never read a book by Grady Hendrix before but after reading this I had to look him up. I found that I was far from the only person who noticed how well he wrote the women characters. He does an excellent job. None of them are perfect, none are completely irredeemable, and they all feel like women I might have met before. However, the men in the story have very little going for them as far as redeemable qualities. I kind of wish that there had been even one male character who seemed to have a little good in him rather than this portrayal of all of them as kind of … only money-focused, controlling, abusive, and somewhat worthless when it came to killing the vampires.

I do understand that the forced helplessness is partly why the women have to take it into their own hands. But every single husband being awful feels unrealistic. But it is also on purpose and definitely an intentional choice by the author. They aren’t all the same flavor of “bad” but it does make you question whether anyone in this town takes their vows seriously.

There is definitely this underlying river of misogyny throughout the book that is infuriating. It is also a huge reason why James Harris is so successful for so long. And I am far from being in the “all men are bad” club but that is also why so many other predators in real life get away with things for so long.

It kind of shines a light on this idea that if someone has enough money, we (as a society) will let them do or say whatever they want.

Also, I am remembering that there are a few young men in Six-Mile who are suspicious of James Harris and do go out of their way to try to stop him. One of the cousins of a little boy who is being targeted follows them into the woods one night and tries to stop him (with only a hammer at his disposal). Maybe they were there to represent men who aren’t just oblivious. They just weren’t main characters so there isn’t a lot of time spent on that part of the story. But they do die trying to fight for their families. Which also leads you to wonder whether this is because their community is more open, more tight-knit, whether culturally they believe in more mystical elements, or if social class has something to do with it. If you have any insight into this part of the story, please share it in the comments because I would like to read your perspective.

Wrap-Up

I’ve really said a lot about the book but it can be boiled down to this.

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is a harrowing and funny book that made me cry, laugh, throw my phone across my bed in repulsion (I was reading the eBook), and made me want to read more. I would recommend this book if you enjoy stories with older protagonists, books that take places in the 90s, and stories about vampires. This is definitely an easy read that I finished pretty quickly (typically between the hours of 11 pm and 3 am, when I had the intention of being asleep by midnight.)

I also really enjoyed the authors notes at the end where Hendrix gives us a brief reading list of famous true crime stories going back to the 15th century (or something like that). It is really funny and enlightening and honestly, it made me appreciate his style of writing even more. It’s definitely worth reading so check it out!

What’s Next?

If you want to read along with me, the next book on my list that I plan to review is The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods.