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.