"Patricia Campbell had always planned for a big life, but
after giving up her career as a nurse to marry an ambitious doctor and become a
mother, Patricia's life has never felt smaller. The days are long, her kids are
ungrateful, her husband is distant, and her to-do list is never really done.
The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a group of
Charleston mothers united only by their love for true-crime and suspenseful
fiction. In these meetings, they're more likely to discuss the FBI's recent
siege of Waco as much as the ups and downs of marriage and motherhood. But when
an artistic and sensitive stranger moves into the neighborhood, the book club's
meetings turn into speculation about the newcomer. Patricia is initially
attracted to him, but when some local children go missing, she starts to
suspect the newcomer is involved. She begins her own investigation, assuming
that he's a Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. What she uncovers is far more
terrifying, and soon she--and her book club--are the only people standing
between the monster they've invited into their homes and their unsuspecting
community"
Most of the appeal of Grady Hendrix’s The
Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires is the juxtaposition of
mundanities of suburban life (which has its own sort of dark secrets) with the
evilness that has come to town. There is also a bit of poking fun at Southern
values, as it tries to walk a tightrope between being a horror tale and trying
to appeal to folks who have seen modern movies set in the South, like Steel
Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes. Also, this tale is set in Charleston, South
Carolina, and begins five years after the events of Hendrix’s last book, My
Best Friend’s Exorcism, but is not a sequel to that novel.
I suspect that Hendrix, who seemly wants to be a Southern version
of Stephen King, is setting his tales in and around the same area where he grew
up because it helps create a certain continuity and points out that while small
towns can have secrets (an overused, but effective cliché), it can draw
unspeakable supernatural evil.
What exactly is James Harris is never fully addressed, though it
seems to be a slight variation on creature King created for The Outsider, an
eternal evil that seduces a town, feeds on it, sucking it dry and then moving
on (though it’s not a shapeshifter). I’m not sure if Hendrix plans a sequel,
though he sort of sets one up, as the creatures says he’s the only one -then
mentions something called the Wide Smiles Club, who’ll come looking for him if
he vanishes.
I did appreciate the subtle humor, the ongoing battle between the
women on their roles in Southern hierarchy in age of the 1990s and feminism
(though all the women are somewhat one-dimensional here), the names of their
children (like Blue, Pony, Parish, the adult’s Slick and Horse), but like My
Best Friend’s Exorcism, I found the book not fully being what I expected. The
funny part, I think I was expecting more of a parody, I guess, than what I got.
However, it also pushes the white savior narrative, which in 2020
seems tasteless. I mean, Mrs. Greene is your typical stereotype black woman,
one who knows a lot about everything, but is never listened to because she’s
black and a domestic. And it’s inventible she knows how to solve these white
women problems, but that is mostly because she is black and the story demands
it. Plus, the area she lives in is filled with kids and young adults who are
seemly taken from every 1970s inner city, Blaxspotation film.
In other words, what you would expect from a white, Southern writer, trying to
create a history about black folks.
It’s not a bad book,
but I do wonder if Grady Hendrix is writing these tales more for his Southern
family and friends, than a wider audience. It has an appealing premise, and
could work as a TV series, but I think they need to make the women less crass
and crude, and make the humor a bit more ironic.
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