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The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

Grady Hendrix

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Mar 08, 2023 Stephanie Faires rated it did not like it

This definitely isn't my kind of genre, and if it hadn't been chosen as our book club reading, I probably would never have read it. I found myself absolutely hating a good chunk of the book but also curious enough that I wanted to see how it ended. This book is not for those with weak stomachs, and I'm glad someone in our club warned us to not eat while reading.

To sum up my thoughts, if I hadn't read this on an electronic device, I would have chucked this book across the room at least a dozen ti This definitely isn't my kind of genre, and if it hadn't been chosen as our book club reading, I probably would never have read it. I found myself absolutely hating a good chunk of the book but also curious enough that I wanted to see how it ended. This book is not for those with weak stomachs, and I'm glad someone in our club warned us to not eat while reading.

To sum up my thoughts, if I hadn't read this on an electronic device, I would have chucked this book across the room at least a dozen times.

The beginning of this book set the tone for a Steel Magnolias-esque group of women, and the hope is that they'll use their unique bond of loving true crime novels and neighborly friendships to help each other through the horrific events about to unfold. That doesn't happen. Instead we get five women who have more or less the same personality, are perfectly complacent submitting to their misogynistic husbands, and who are COMPLETELY SHITTY to one another. Hendrix must have projected the women's downright confusing and feeble behavior because he thought they reflected normal 1990s white upper-class southern housewives. He couldn't have possibly given at least one of them a backbone or a mind of her own. That didn't sit well with me. Not to mention the overt racism in making Mrs. Greene, a black woman who cleans these white ladies houses and cares for their families, the true hero of the story by doing all the dirty work throughout the novel -- yet we see Hendrix still centering on the narratives of the book club ladies who ultimately get painted as the heroines in the end. Maybe there's some reverse-psychology that I'm missing here or maybe this is supposed to be some crappy satire, but Hendrix seemed very uncommitted toward challenging the issues of racism, misogyny, gaslighting, and sexism even though he laced them through every page of the book.

If you're a more seasoned true crime and horror genre reader, you might get more out of the book than I did, since it does reference a lot of the classics throughout the novel. However, I personally think that the glaring issues I described above really detracted from the "fun vampire" story this was supposed to be. ...more

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Feb 18, 2023 Joshua Roach rated it it was ok

The only reason this book didn’t get 1 star was because I’ve read the “Bible” (King James version), and Jordan Tarver’s “You Deserve This Shit.” The minutes I wasted in the morning before work, over a cup of coffee, plowing through this book, when I could be doing FUCKING ANYTHING ELSE, devastates me. The plot holes, the feeble attempts at shock factor, the contradiction of trying to portray female empowerment, juxtaposed with portraying shitty, weak, female characters made me want to vomit. And ...more

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Feb 19, 2023 Amaris Mariel rated it liked it

Jan 27, 2023 Jason Bennett rated it liked it

Feb 04, 2023 Abby W. rated it liked it

Feb 08, 2023 Michaelyn Shepard rated it it was ok

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