The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

by Grady Hendrix

Every story begins in blood: a squalling baby yanked from the womb, bathed in mucus and half a quart of their mother’s blood. But not many stories end in blood these days.

Sometimes she craved a little danger. And that was why she had book club.

she’d learned two things: they were all in this together, and if their husbands ever took out a life insurance policy on them they were in trouble.

I feel like there’s a train already moving and no matter how fast I run I can never catch up.”

“The police think all kind of things,” Mrs. Greene said. “Doesn’t necessarily make them true.”

“We want the people we know to be who we think they are, and to stay how we know them.

“Clean all you want,” Patricia said. “But whenever Bennett has a drink, he’s still going to smack you in the mouth.” Grace stood, frozen in shock. Patricia couldn’t believe she had said that. They stayed like that in the freezing cold dining room for a long moment, and Patricia knew their friendship would never recover. She turned and left the room.

Carter stood by the door, not moving, arms folded, surveying the scene he had created, not going to comfort their son, not unstrapping her arms so she could do it instead, and Patricia thought, I will never forgive you for this. Never. Never. Never.

It’s not such a big thing, she said to herself, to ignore some crazy, terrible idea you were once convinced was once true in exchange for all this, for the dock, and the car, and the trip to London, and your ear, and college for the children, and step aerobics for Korey, and a friend for Blue, and for so much of everything. It isn’t such a bad trade at all.

She needed to reassure herself that not all men got away with it, not every time.

“You said you wanted to live where people watched out for each other,” Patricia told her. “But what’s the good of watching if we’re not going to act?”

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.”

“Thank you for coming tonight,” she said. “We couldn’t have done it alone.” “None of us could have done this alone,” Grace said.

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.

What had been destroyed made what remained that much more precious. That much more solid. That much more important.