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Book Review: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix


The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

Quirk Books, 2020

ISBN-13: 9781683691433

Available: Hardback, Kindle edition, Audible audiobook

 

It’s the 1990s in Charleston, South Carolina. Patricia Campbell gave up her nursing career to do what proper Southern white women were expected to do: marry a successful man (in Patricia’s case, an ambitious doctor), and then soon after become a mother. She thought that with this little family she would have the perfect life. In reality, her husband spends long days and nights at work, her daughter seemingly doesn’t need her mother anymore, her son is obsessed with Nazis, and her mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who suffers from dementia, needs constant care. She can’t keep up with her to-do list, let alone finish anything. Even with a new caretaker, Mrs. Greene, in the picture, she is still overwhelmed with domestic life. She’s not alone.

Patricia joins a book club with fellow housewives Grace, Kitty, Maryellen, and Slick. They bond over true crime and domestic not-quite-bliss. In their meetings, the women indulge in conversation and friendly debate regarding the FBI’s siege of Waco, Ann Rule’s friendship with Ted Bundy before and after she discovered he was a serial killer, and more.

After one of their meetings, Patricia ventures outside in the dark to take the trash out, only to be attacked by an elderly neighbor, Mrs. Savage, who is digging through the garbage and snacking in the innards of a dead racoon. She charges and attacks Patricia, tearing off part of her ear. Patricia is left with graphic memories of the attack, as well as feeling terrible for the old woman who was responsible for it, despite her being rather disagreeable in life. Soon after, Mrs. Savage’s enigmatic and charismatic nephew, James Harris, moves into the neighborhood. Patricia is intrigued by the newcomer, especially being the first of the book club to meet him in a rather unconventional way. She notices red flags immediately, but ignores them, thinking that maybe she’s letting the true crime books get the better of her. Suddenly, the book club meeting topic changes from discussing true crime to speculating on this stranger in their midst. Everyone seems to be talking about him. Even Miss Mary has something to say about him, although she calls him by a different name and accuses him of horrible things.

Then, children on the other side of town in Six Mile, a struggling Black community, start to go missing. Police write off the cases, claiming suicides or drugs are behind the disappearances. Patricia, desperate to get to the bottom of the disappearances, makes her way into the community where her mother-in-law’s caretaker lives to get more information and discuss her suspicions about James. What she discovers as the story unfolds is that James is far more sinister than she realized, and a real monster.

The friendships depicted are strong, and they go through their ups and downs as any adult friendship does. It is refreshing to read that none of the women, or the men for that matter, are perfect, despite the culture telling them they need to be. Slick blurts out at a book club meeting that she freezes sandwiches for her children’s school lunches just to save time. Grace works to maintain order and cleanliness in her house to an agonizing degree. To get out of the house to attend the book club meetings, Slick tells her husband that it’s a Bible study group. Those are only a few examples of what is expected of the housewives.

The Southern Book Club to Slaying Vampires is a fast read, with interesting and realistic characters, a solid storyline, and well written horror with the right amount of humor mixed in. Hendrix has been a favorite author of mine since Horrorstör, and this novel does not disappoint.

Contains: blood, gore, implied domestic abuse, rats and roaches, sexual assault, dismemberment, body horror

Highly recommended

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

Posted on June 6, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Clear by Ray Leigh

Clear by Ray Leigh

Bad Press Ink, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9168845-1-3

Available: Kindle

 

Twenty years ago, writer and then youth worker Ray Leigh saw firsthand the brutal lives of addicts, dealers, prostitutes, and thieves, as well as police and “government men” gone bad, and wrote Clear to capture the dark side of 1990s London. Leigh writes in a style he calls “distilled prose” which seems like a hybrid of a long narrative poem and a screenplay. The text is arranged to cross the length of the page rather than the width, and transitions in the action, dialogue and descriptions are marked by small, black daggers.

 

In a patchwork of quick scenes and character sketches, Clear captures the conflict, violence, dread, and horror in a part of the city that some people only glimpse on the news and that other people actually experience as a nightmare they are trying to get “clear” of but never will. Leigh includes the expected crime and poverty, but he also makes the fragments of story poignantly relatable by incorporating the ordinary parts of the characters’ day, things like what and where they eat or their interaction  with their children. This is a dysfunctional community with its own definitions of life, relationships, and values.

 

Leigh suggests that this work is, in part, a “love story.” That makes sense because there is so much attention paid to the heartbreak, sadness, and disappointment of these people that it is easy to conclude that Leigh knew and cared about them. Clear is so terrifying because there is a certain normalcy to this nightmarish flip-side to typical city living. To fully realize that both the typical and nightmare lives go on simultaneously, each a sort of parallel universe, is chilling and should only be the stuff of science fiction. Recommended.

 

Contains: violence, sex, crude language, adult subject matter

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Posted on June 5, 2020 by , Reply

Musings: Making Sense of Horror

One nice thing about reading is that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end (except for a few left unfinished when the author died, like The Mystery of Edwin Drood). If the story is messy on the page, I can skip it, I can choose another. Outside the conventions of storytelling or the covers of a book, I have to live in an increasingly messy world that does not make a lot of sense (as do we all), and is frankly quite terrifying. I grew up in a nice little bubble where the ugliness of the world really didn’t infringe on my daily life and even now, despite many challenges, and with a lot more knowledge of the world, it doesn’t touch me the way it does for many, many others.

The past few years, and especially the time since the pandemic became a prominent part of our lives, have revealed a lot of that ugliness, but many of us thought surely there was a way forward for change. One story would end, we would get to start another with a new political season where we could change the system without tearing it apart. A vaccine for the coronavirus would be found, our lives could go back to the way they were. Not a happily ever after, but a story does end, even if another one begins right away.

There is a cloud of horror around the events taking place in Minneapolis and surrounding areas, and in other cities (including two in my own state) where peaceful protesters have been attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets. In a city near me, a medic center had its supplies taken by the police (including milk, used to treat tear gas) just before they sprayed tear gas on protesters. The rage and disorder have been building for a long time and the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was the spark. I can’t make it coherent and I can’t see ahead.

Who are the monsters who come next in our fiction? Originally, Godzilla was a response to dropping the atomic bomb, zombies and vampires have come to mean different things as time has changed. Even as people are already writing pandemic fiction, there are still inequities the pandemic exposes, and the wounds it opens and salts provide a lot of fresh material. What horror awaits us in fiction that isn’t already here?

 

A note: Be kind to one another and give each other grace. We all need it, especially now.

Posted on May 30, 2020 by , Reply
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