The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

by Grady Hendrix

“I am not sure what the appropriate gesture is to make toward the family of the woman who bit off your ear, but if you felt absolutely compelled, I certainly wouldn’t take food.”

“A reader lives many lives,” James Harris said. “The person who doesn’t read lives but one. But if you’re happy just doing what you’re told and reading what other people think you should read, then don’t let me stop you. I just find it sad.”

After she’d read that passage in Dracula about him needing to be invited into a home, she’d sat down and read the entire book again and halfway through she’d come across a sentence that brought her up short and made her hands turn cold. He can command all the meaner things, Van Helsing told the Harkers, explaining the powers of Dracula. The rat, and the owl, and the bat… The rat.

He thinks we’re what we look like on the outside: nice Southern ladies. Let me tell you something…there’s nothing nice about Southern ladies.”

Think of us what you will, she thought, we made mistakes, and probably scarred our children for life, and we froze sandwiches, and forgot car pool, and got divorced. But when the time came, we went the distance.