Book review on “The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

So…about this book…

I know it was out in 2020, but a lot of shit came out then, so it took me a while to get to this one. I also bought it last year and finally read it in March 2024, so yeah. Timelines don’t matter when it comes to reading books. They only matter when you are in them. Let’s just say the timeline in this one was meh. 

If I could describe this book in short, I would say…

This book is about what happens when traditional Southern wives find the limits of their “allyship,” but then rally when the problem comes to their own homes and the Black woman saves the day. 

Now, if that is all you wanted about how I viewed the story, feel free to stop there. I will continue on though. So feel free to keep reading as I talk about this helluva ride in a book. I still haven’t decided if it was a good thing yet, so maybe I will get there at the end of this. We’ll all find out at the same time. 

So this book was written by Gary Hendrix, a man who thinks it is comedic to write about a vampiric predator that chooses to prey on poor Black children because he knows no one cares about them. Considering this is billed as a comedic horror, I have to wonder about those that found a chuckle in this book, because I couldn’t really find one. 

Hold on, I’ll give a synopsis before we really get into how I feel about it. 

TRIGGER WARNING: Harm against children, Racism, Ageism, Sexism, Sexual Assault including assault of minors, attempted suicide, GORE, and I would say cruelty to animals, because the family dog dies horribly. 

So the story starts with a woman named Patricia. She is a housewife that gave up nursing for the valuable role of a homemaker. She is the wife of a psychiatrist who is in line for a huge promotion, so he is always busy at work. She has two children, a daughter and a son. The daughter is the average teenage girl that is obsessed with step aerobics and her friends. Her son is obsessed with Nazis. (found any humor yet? I haven’t.)

Patricia is also charged with taking care of her mother-in-law who has dementia. This task is tough, but her husband really believes in her ability to do this because no one else wants to do it. The book starts off with Patricia attending a very posh book club where they only discuss classics and aptly avoid anything related to genre fiction or their favorites: true crime. Could this be a discussion on the intellectualism of literary versus genre fiction? You’d like to think that wouldn’t you. Nope, that gets solved pretty quickly in the book. Patricia doesn’t read the book and has to present for the posh book club and thus gets embarrassed. Afterwards, she and a few friends (including Grace, Kitty, and Slick) come together and decide to start their own book club where they get to read whatever they want. Problem solved. 

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One of the things the ladies can’t seem to get enough of is town gossip. Like the new gentleman that has come to town to help his ailing aunt take care of herself. Patricia only knows the woman because she is scared of the family dog. Anyway, Patricia has a run in with the woman because one night she goes outside to investigate her trash being turned over and finds the elderly woman crouched over a dead raccoon and eating its viscera. Patricia tries to run to get help but trips over the trash. The old lady bites a piece of her ear off, and we are in the early chapters of the book. The old lady dies in the hospital. Patricia’s half-eaten ear is just there for over half of the book. 

She meets the lady’s nephew,  by breaking into the home and trying to resuscitate him. She eventually becomes his friend and helps him open a bank account and get set up within the town. He is very sensitive to light, so it is difficult to get around during the day. She even invites him over for dinner/dessert on occasion. Her son LOVES the man. They get to share information about Nazis and Ayn Rand. OMG if the red flags weren’t glaringly obvious, I don’t know what would work. 

Patricia tries to have a book club meeting at her home, but her mother-in-law interrupts them in the nude and the ladies leave early to spare her the embarrassment. In steps Mrs. Ursula Greene to help Patricia take care of her mother-in-law as well as the house. Everything is great. Patricia has time to actually have a social life now when she isn’t playing being “Mom” and “happy wife.”

Oddly enough, Patricia’s mother-in-law recognizes James. She keeps calling him the name of a man she knew when she was a child. She even swears that she has a photo of him. People dismiss her as the “crazy old lady.” It’s okay because eventually she dies from being attacked by very large vicious rats. Mrs. Greene was there. She tried to save the woman even though she was hurt herself. The family dog doesn’t make it either. I can’t imagine cleaning that up and STILL staying in that town. 

Anyway, Patricia eventually gets suspicious of James. She also notes the weird things going on in the next town over that is primarily full of poor Black people. Children are going missing. When they are found, they appear to be drugged. Then, eventually they kill themselves. These are children ages 6-9, but no one cares about them because they happen to be Black. Anyway, Patricia tries to help to the skepticism of Mrs. Greene, who has already sent her children away. Patricia actually goes into the woods behind the home of the most recent missing child and finds a very familiar looking van (psst…it’s James’ van). She opens the door and sees James with a proboscis coming out of his mouth and attached to this child’s femoral artery. 

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Anyway, Patricia tries to turn the man in. She tries to rally the town against James. The problem is that James has started getting into business with the men of the town, and the men will not have anyone slander their new moneymaker. They step in and squash all of the investigations against him. Patricia is BIG mad. She even overdoses on the Prozac that her husband prescribes because she is so angry. She wakes up bound in a hospital. At the threat of losing her children, she decides to get back in line. 

Three years pass and we are led to believe that Patricia is in a bit of a fog where everything is perfect. It is akin to Stepford wives without the machinery, I’m guessing. Either way, Hendrix didn’t really hit the mark. One day she is cleaning up her home and she hears an eerie and familiar voice. It is the ghost of her mother-in-law telling her that James is after her children and to go to Mrs. Greene for proof of who he is. The mother-in-law shared with her what he did before she was killed, so Patricia knew exactly what she was talking about. 

Anyway, Patricia goes to Mrs. Greene to beg for help even though she abandoned her and the poor Black community three years ago. Mrs. Greene eventually complies and agrees to help. Mrs. Greene has the photo of James from back when the mother-in-law was a child. They agree to try to sneak into James’ house for evidence. Patricia gets into his house and finds nothing at first, but then, she gets into the attic and sees a dead body from over three years ago that is still recognizable by the eyes that are apparently still there. (This is where you are supposed to start suspending belief, I guess.) 

She narrowly escapes the man’s house because Mrs. Greene creates a diversion big enough to get the man out of his home even though he knew Patricia was there. SHOUT OUT TO MRS. GREENE!!!

Anyway, she eventually catches James feeding on her daughter. She figures out that James has been feeding on her for a while. At this point, James has also attacked Slick (book club buddy) and implanted something inside of her that is slowly killing her by destroying her immune system. (AIDS copycat?) 

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Still after all of this, the book club is hesitant to get involved with taking this man down because they have tried before, this doesn’t affect them, and they could get into trouble with their husbands. Basically, allyship to them is an extracurricular activity and shouldn’t impact their daily lives. Sounds familiar, right? Anyway, Mrs. Greene is also there and the shame of abandoning her and the other children combined with seeing that Patricia’s children (one of their own) are under attack finally convinces them to come together. 

Patricia has to be the bait because James really wants her. She goes into the house all prostrate while he calls her and the whole town dumb. He promises to leave her children alone for a year while he feeds on her. They go upstairs, but not not before Patricia discreetly unlocks the door. The ladies come in and find Patricia on the bed naked with a shirtless James feeding on her femoral artery. They jump him, and he gives them a run for their money. The man is strong. Eventually, Kitty uses her plus-sized force <insert eye roll> to get him down and pushes a knife into his neck temporarily paralyzing him. 

They get him in the bathroom, and Mrs. Greene starts dressing (butchering) this man like a deer. I mean she really goes in. This man has the nerve to still talk shit, by the way. I was so glad when they finally decapitated him. They honestly should have done that first. Goodness, he wouldn’t shut up. Also, his superiority complex was well developed. Also, a weird fact: his penis is depicted as being upside down. Anyway, each part has to be bagged separately so as to not allow him to come back together. Mrs. Greene does the butchering by herself while the other women just bag the parts. She even takes a break to resuscitate Patricia because everyone else was panicking, I guess. 

Anyway, they finally finished cleaning up. Grace and Mrs. Greene cleaned up any traces of the man. They bury his body parts in two tombs, so he will never be able to pull himself together. Patricia finally divorces her husband and moves into a condo with some money she stashed from helping James over three years ago and some money given to her by Grace. Slick dies after requesting to be cremated because of the thing James implanted in her. 

This book is really worth a read because of the compelling nature. It doesn’t bury the lede at all. The ride starts pretty early. I can honestly say that this was a lesson in keeping people hooked on a story regardless of how shitty it is. Making James a vampire was, I’m assuming, a digestible way of creating a p*d*ph*l* villain without much of a fuss. 

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Like I said, the main gripe I really had about this book was that it wasn’t funny. I didn’t laugh at all. I get the horror aspect. It was definitely that. It was also thrilling and compelling, it just wasn’t funny. I also really detest the Magical Negro trope. I know some people would say that Mrs. Greene wasn’t that, but she was minus the literal magic. She was definitely mammi-fied and given the Black Savior trope. 

I didn’t find the story entertaining because it is just telling the truth of what happens. The extra stuff like the rats or the old lady eating the dead raccoon were definitely for shock value, but none of it deterred me from the story of a racist town next to a poor Black town where the women played victim the ENTIRE time. 

Anyway, this one wasn’t a fave by any stretch of the imagination, but for some reason, it deserves some thoughts from me. I liked the pacing of this one as well. Hendrix knew when to make the story interesting because he didn’t linger too long in the mundane. I don’t hate-read books. I’ve definitely DNF’d quite a few because they were just terrible. With this one, I didn’t hate it enough to toss it, AND it was compelling enough for me to want to know how it ended. I can only attest that the writing was good enough for that. 

Whelp…this has gone on long enough. I think that’s all of the thoughts I have for this one. 

If you’d like to see someone else’s thoughts on the book, feel free to check out the link here:

Let's Chat About The Southern Book Club's Guide To Slaying Vampires | Spoilers! [CC]

Until next time…Later babes…

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