Books: How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix (2023)

“When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world. Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she’ll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it’ll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market. But some houses don’t want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them.”

As someone put this, How to Sell a Haunted House is like Annabelle meets Child’s Play, mixed with a wonderfully Southern dysfunctional family drama. It’s also about dark secrets our family –both intimate and extended- keeps. Ones we sadly pass down from one generation to the next. Where Hendrix’s previous work was bit homage’s to growing up in the 80s and 90s, this is a bit more mature work, but still filled with his perfect dark sense of humor. I mean, I guess, less campy, even if he treads familiar ground with possessed dolls.

It’s not a perfect novel, as it takes forever to get going and it takes a lot to really like Louise and Mark –even when I see some my own sibling rivalry in their relationship. They’re both rather horrible people, but I can understand Louise’s choice to leave Charleston and move to San Francisco. She’s escaping her family’s problems with hopes of starting fresh. Still, at times Mark and her relationship is a bit soap opera-ish and some of the dialogue about modern parenting is reminder that while I may not have the most perfect mother, she never worried about explain to us concepts like death and being a consistent parent. And Aunt Honey easily gives up the dark tale of the family after keeping it buried for sixty-eight years.

I can’t hate it, as it was silly fun, and Hendrix appears to maturing as writer of Southern Gothic Horror, but like his previous tomes, it stumbles here and there and never becomes a home run you think it should

Books: The Final Girls Support Group By Grady Hendrix (2021)

“In horror movies, the final girl is the one who's left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her? Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she's not alone. For more than a decade she's been meeting with five other actual final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynnette's worst fears are realized--someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart again, piece by piece. But the thing about these final girls is that they have each other now, and no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.”

While The Final Girl Support Group pays homage to the last four decades of slasher films, the books themes writer Grady Hendrix trots out gets lost in the seemly torpid James Patterson inspired dialogue and Hendrix’s attempt to appeal to a certain sub-group of teens who came of age in the late 1980s and early 90s. It wants to be a clever dissection of the genre, but can’t get over what is an essentially B-film horror schlock.

I caught early on that this book was also a sort of attempt to explore male misogyny and a lot of women’s obsession with true crime books and local murders. We get the men who hate women and women who become enamored of popular male killers –and how they can be easily manipulated, these impressionable teens. Then he tries to use those tropes and themes to give women the ability to fight back.

My biggest issue was keeping all the characters straight –I mean all the women in most of these horror films are essentially the same character. There is really nothing to separate them, to make them stand apart from each other. And it didn’t help I felt no emotional connection to even the main protagonist, Lynn. I can’t understand anyone, let a women, who suffer such trauma, but Lynn never made anyone, even herself, remotely likable.

Another mixed bag for me, an interesting (maybe brilliant) dea but executed in an only half interesting way. Which is funny, considering I’ve had the basic same issues with his two previous novels, My Best Friend’s Exorcism and The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires.

I don’t know, maybe this may have worked as a novella more than a novel.

Books: The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix (2020)

"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.