Ms. Hen reviews The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires

Grady Hendrix

Quirk Books

2020

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because someone she follows on Twitter read it, and she is into vampires right now. She read about the book, and thought she would give it a chance, though she does not usually buy hardcover books, times are different now.

This novel is about a group of women in a book club who decide to read crime books, fiction and nonfiction. A strange man moves to their neighborhood, and Patricia, the protagonist, befriends him. She eventually finds out that he is a vampire. This novel is steeped in the South; it takes place in South Carolina in a small town. People who live there write down license plate numbers of cars seen in the area that they don’t know, and the women are housewives, none of them work, and they are serious about taking care of their families.

Ms. Hen thinks this novel might have supposed to be funny, but she doesn’t think it is. She thinks it’s sad that people live this way, suburban housewives who have nothing to do except fret over making lunch for their children and who is driving the carpool. She thinks the characters might have been intended to be satirical, but she’s not sure. She doesn’t know how anyone could live like this, and if they do, Ms. Hen feels sorry for them. Maybe Ms. Hen doesn’t understand Southern culture enough, but she doesn’t get it.

As for the horror elements, they were scary, but not scary enough. Ms. Hen didn’t take the book seriously enough to be scared by it. If she gets scared, she’s genuinely scared, and not half-scared, or scared in-between the silliness. She doesn’t think anyone would take this novel seriously, because the characters are so shallow and lifeless, she doesn’t know what to think of them.

The characters all blend into each other. The members of the book club who aren’t Patricia seem the same to Ms. Hen. She knows they’re different in some way, but trying to tell them apart was too difficult for Ms. Hen. She really doesn’t like any of them. And the novel seems racist to Ms. Hen. The African American characters are stereotypical and one-dimensional. Ms. Hen thinks that some people would get offended by this, the way she is.

This book is not the type that Ms. Hen would stop reading because she can't stomach it, however. The writing is acceptable, and though it is ridiculous at times, it is well-paced, and readable. She doesn’t know why people would love to read a pointless book like this, and Ms. Hen will be more careful deciding which vampire novels to read because she knows there are a lot of truly bad ones out there.

Ms. Hen reviews The Almost Moon

The Almost Moon

Alice Sebold

Little, Brown and Company

2007

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because she picked it up at a Little Free Library near where she lives before the time when she wouldn’t touch anything for fear of illness. She had read THE LOVELY BONES by this author years ago, and when she found this book, she read the first line and it intrigued her. It is, “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.” Who could not be fascinated by a line like this? Ms. Hen was hooked.

This novel is about a woman, Helen, who kills her mother in a heat of passion, and spends the next twenty-four hours thinking about her life and what is has come to. She is divorced and has two grown daughters who live far away, and she kept living near her mother in order to take care of her. Her mother was mentally ill, and was agoraphobic, and never left the house for years. He father committed suicide. Her ex-husband is an artist, and she was his model, and afterwards, she became a model at the college near where she lived.

One of Ms. Hen’s problems with this novel is that all the characters seem like they’re not very nice people. They have a way of talking to each other that sounds like they should be living in a sitcom like ROSEANNE or THE MIDDLE, a chirpy, screaming way of conversation that Ms. Hen found she couldn’t stand. It’s not that Ms. Hen thought that Helen was wrong to kill her mother; in fact, she thought she had good reason to do so, but she thinks that Helen didn’t go about it the right way, that she could have gotten away with it if she wasn’t so stupid. All the characters in this novel don’t seem very intelligent to Ms. Hen.

Another aspect of this novel that Ms. Hen didn’t like is the ending. The reader never learns what happens to Helen. Ms. Hen can appreciate an ambiguous ending in a short story, because that’s a place where it’s okay for an ending like that, but after we spend almost three hundred pages following Helen around trying to find out what will happen to her, we never find out! There is no ending! Ms. Hen hated this. She wanted to know. She understands this could be a literary technique, but she thinks it’s cheap, and it’s cheating the reader.

Ms. Hen read this novel fast, not because she thought it was good, but because she wanted to find out what happened to Helen, and then she never found out! Ms. Hen does not recommend this novel. You should read something else.

Ms. Hen reviews Dubliners

Dubliners

James Joyce

Penguin

1914

Ms. Hen had read DUBLINERS many years ago, but she decided to read it again, because she wanted to read a book on her phone while she was working, and she thought short stories would work well for this scheme, that way, she would not forget what happened in the book since she only works one day a week. She does not think it’s right to read a book while she is at work, because it would appear as if she is not working. But everyone always looks at their phones, so she has no problem reading on her Kindle App. She prefers hardcopy books, but we can’t always have what we want, as this new era has taught us.

Ms. Hen was reminded of how charming and realistic all of these stories are. A lot of them seem to Ms. Hen as if they are about characters who are looking at another life different from their own life, and wondering what it would be like to be somewhere or someone else. In the story “An Encounter,” two schoolboys skip school and try to cause trouble, but a man disturbs them by speaking of beautiful young girls, and they run off. In “A Painful Case,” an older man who lives alone befriends a woman who is married, but then breaks off with her, and it shocked was she dies suddenly. He had a brief time of happiness when he knew the woman, but feels worse when he learns of how she died. “A Mother” is about a young girl who has an overbearing mother who demands that her daughter be paid for her accompaniment on the piano at a concert. Her mother thinks that it’s important that her daughter be paid because it is in a contract. All these stories are about people looking at other’s lives and yearning for change, but it most likely will never come.

These stories have a comfortable air to Ms. Hen; she has read them before, but when she read it this time, it was almost like she had lived them before, and they are about a world in which the characters believe will always be the same, and cannot change because if it did, it would be as if everything turned upside down.

When Ms. Hen read “The Dead," she had the odd feeling of familiarity, like she had been in the room where the Christmas party took place before. She thinks that this is an excellent example of how to write a party scene, and Ms. Hen can learn a lot from it. (She has written some party scenes recently, and they’re difficult to pull off.) Every character is accounted for and the scene moves from one end to the other and we can see what’s happening with everyone piece by piece. “The Dead” is a sad story, and one that can touch a lot of people, because there are ghosts who haunt them, who they carry around and never tell anyone until it comes out if a burst like Greta when she tells her husband the story of her youthful love and his tragic death.

Ms. Hen thinks everyone should read DUBLINERS, not just because it is a classic, but because it’s about people who lived in a era that is like a time capsule that will never exist again. They think things won’t change, but they have no idea what’s around the corner. Neither do we.

Ms. Hen reviews Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

Carrie Brownstein

Riverhead Books

2015

Ms. Hen decided to read this book because it was hanging around in her hen-sister’s room, and she is currently running out of books to read. She thought if she read this right after Patti Smith’s book, they would compliment each other, since both were both written by musicians. Ms. Hen came to the conclusion that these books have nothing in common, and Patti and Carrie are starkly different people. That is, Carrie seems like a much more normal, down to earth person, the type that Ms. Hen would actually be able to hang out with if she met.

This novel is about Ms. Brownstein’s life, her passion for music, and her time in Sleater-Kinney. Ms. Hen realized while reading this that she and Ms. Brownstein are almost the same age, and the music and events occurred during the same time period as Ms. Hen's childhood. She remembers the same music and pop culture happenings. It’s eerie for Ms. Hen to read about someone’s youth who lived on the other side of the country, who liked the same music at the same time. Ms. Hen’s and her lives were not exactly the same, but she thinks it’s interesting that there are people in this country, and maybe all over the world, who have the same pop culture background.

But this is mostly a book about being in a rock band, and the joy and hardship it brings. Everyone has heard about how difficult it is to be on the road, especially if your biggest band is not the biggest band, but it can cause physical pain and illness like it did to Carrie. She is a self-professed hypochondriac, but she did get sick a lot on tour. They had fun making music, but it took a lot of sacrifice.

Ms. Hen has to admit that she was never a Sleater-Kinney fan. She is, however, a fan of PORTLANDIA, the TV show that Ms. Brownstein created and appears in that takes place in Portland Oregon, which is about how ridiculous Portland is, and how extremely liberal and so called “alternative” it is, if that word is still used. Ms. Hen decided to listen to some Sleater-Kinney while she was reading this book, and she likes select songs, but she thinks some of the music is mostly screaming, but with a catchy pop beat, which is essentially what punk rock strives to be.

(Ms. Hen believes that in one of her alternate lives she was in a rock band, and was moderately successful. She imagines that her life would have been something like the one in this book, but with more of a Boston flavor.)

Even though Ms. Hen confesses that she was never a Sleater-Kinney fan, she is a fan of Ms. Brownstein’s writing. This book is extremely well written, gripping and entertaining. Ms. Hen is a fan of anyone who can write and has a good story to tell, and this book succeeds in both those respects.

Ms. Hen reviews Year of the Monkey

Year of the Monkey

Patti Smith

Alfred A. Knopf

2019

Ms. Hen read this because she has read a couple of other books by Patti Smith and she genuinely liked them. She received this as a birthday gift from her hen-sister because she told her she wanted it.  Her birthday seems like a long time ago, even though it was only at the beginning of March. So much in the world has changed since then, and reading this book made Ms. Hen wonder what Patti would have to say about the situation we are in now.

This memoir is about the Year of the Monkey, 2016. Ms. Smith starts the book by writing about her friend Sandy Pearlman and how he was in a coma in January of that year. They were supposed to go to Santa Cruz and stay at a place called the Dream Inn, but instead she went by herself, and the Inn haunted her. She had conversations with the sign at the inn that told her to be aware of her dreams. This book is full of dreams and hopes and grief.

YEAR OF THE MONKEY is an easy book to read, but it’s difficult to follow. It reminds Ms. Hen a lot of M TRAIN, the memoir Ms. Smith wrote about coffee and traveling during her lecture tours and going on quests to find places that interested her. She’s obsessed with artists of all eras, and remembers everyone’s birthday obsessively. Ms. Hen admires this about her, but Ms. Hen is not a person who’s obsessed with artists, more of stories.

Ms. Hen remembers the year of the monkey, 2016. Some things in her life changed that year, and she remembers the feeling in the country that followed the election: the fear, the anticipation, the chaos, and the hope that things would change in the future. Ms. Smith writes about this eloquently in this book.

Ms. Hen thinks that Patti Smith lives on a different plane than most people. She’s not sure if it’s because Ms. Smith has spent so much time working on her art, or if she’s simply a strange person, and can’t help being how she is. Ms. Hen admires the way she views the world, and finds it inspirational that she does her own thing. Ms. Hen would like to try to see the world through Patti’s eyes for a time, the weird, beautiful world where everything is a marvel, and the possibilities are endless.