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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: Nine Elms (Kate Marshall Book 1) by Robert Bryndza

Nine Elms by Robert Bryndza

Thomas & Mercer, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-542005-68-5

Availability: Hardcover,  paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

When it comes to reading choices, there are a LOT of crime thrillers featuring a female detective as the lead available, and many of them get turned into a series of books.  For a book to stand out from the competition, the story and writing has to be very good.  Robert Bryndza’s new book Nine Elms meets both of the criteria.  Excitement, good story development, solid characters, unexpected plot twists… all the elements are there.  It won’t be any surprise to see heroine Kate Marshall return for another go-around in a second book, and continue what looks to be a the start of yet another enjoyable series.

The book starts fifteen years prior, with a 26 page lead-in to the main story.  Kate is a detective, on the trail of a killer known as the Nine Elms Cannibal (although he doesn’t eat his victims, he simply takes a few bites out of each of them).  The author takes a nice swing at the media, when it’s revealed that despite the lack of actual cannibalism, the media hung the nickname on the killer in their never-ending quest for sensationalism.    Kate catches the killer and becomes a hero, but she quickly becomes the goat due to her relationship with the killer, and she resigns from the police force.

Jump ahead 15 years: Kate is a professor of criminology at a local college.  She receives a letter out of the blue from a family who found new evidence in the case of their daughter’s murder, which happened 20 years ago.  They want to hire her to look into it, since the police aren’t interested.  Kate and her academic assistant, Tristan, reluctantly agree.  Another string of grisly murders starts at the same time, and Kate sees similarities between the Nine Elms Cannibal killings, the new ones, and the cold case of the daughter.  Kate and Tristan are slowly but surely drawn into the fray.  It’s a race to track down the new killer, and find out how all three cases tie together.

Author Bryndza writes with a sure hand, like the seasoned literary veteran of detective writing he is.  No wasted words, no overdevelopment, and no slow parts: every chapter guns along at a fast clip and rolls right into the next chapter, guaranteed to keep you turning pages.  Of course, half the fun of these books is trying to guess the killer’s identity, and Bryndza does a good job keeping it hidden until close to the end.  It’s usually done one of two ways in crime thrillers: the killer was introduced as someone living behind a mask in the beginning, or he doesn’t make an actual appearance until partway through.  The author chooses the correct one here for maximum effect.  It helps that the story has three threads to work off of, as the original Nine Elms killer still does play a significant role throughout the book, and an important part in the climax.  For readers that always need the “why?” question answered as to the killer’s motives, Bryndza does provide enough explanation for both killers.  It’s not overly done, just enough to make sense and keep the story rolling.   His characters are also nicely done in shades of gray: they are not just one-dimensional, especially Kate.  She’s not perfect, and has her weaknesses like everyone else.

As Dabney Coleman famously said to Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, “what’s the bottom line here…?” The bottom line for Nine Elms is, if you like crime thrillers, you don’t want to miss this one.  It isn’t quite up to the gold standard that Graham Masterton set for detective novels with his Katie Maguire series, but it’s a strong contender for the silver.  Recommended.

 

Contains: violence, profanity, mild gore

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on January 7, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin

Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin

Wednesday Books, 2020

ISBN-13: 978-1250239549

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Sixteen year old Elle and her friends Jenny, Summer, and Mads, are glamorous, vicious, daughters of the ultra-rich whose parents have given them a lot of freedom, When the four girls crash a party for the lacrosse team for the elite prep school, St. Andrews, what starts out as fun becomes a lot less so as the girls are separated and most of the lacrosse team colludes in drugging and raping Elle.

But this is not the story of Elle as either a victim or a survivor. This is the story of how Elle plans to kill off every member of the lacrosse team who had any kind of involvement in orchestrating or participating in her rape, backed by her friends, or “coven”.  As she looks at a photo of the St. Andrews lacrosse team, she spots one boy who was not involved, and decides she’s going to manipulate him into killing his teammates.  Cutting and dyeing her hair, she transfers to St. Andrews to get close to her future victims, and especially, to get close to Mack, the player who didn’t take part, so she can convince him that knocking off his teammates is the right thing to do, and set him up as the fall guy. Even falling in love with him– and she thinks she might be falling in love with him– isn’t enough to take her mind and her heart off vengeance.

Foul and Fair takes its inspiration from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, positioning Elle’s friends as the three witches, Elle as Lady Macbeth, and Mack as Macbeth. Rather than convincing him to kill out of ambition, though, Elle convinces him he is killing out of righteousness.  Elle’s murderous anger slashes through the book.

Unfortunately, the scenario of entitled, rich, white guys raping a girl at a party without having to face consequences isn’t an unrealistic one, and certainly Elle’s feelings, and the bonds of her friendships, are strong. But the likelihood of the girls getting away with tormenting and setting up the members of the lacrosse team, especially without getting caught, is something the reader really has to buy into, as is the likelihood of Elle convincing a guy she’s known less than a week to kill his best friend.

Elle is not a sympathetic character (neither is Lady Macbeth, to be fair) although we get to see a few heroic moments in flashbacks to the beginnings of the four girls’ friendships, like her defense of Mads, a trans girl, on the day Mads outed herself at school (Mads is a great character who doesn’t get enough time, and Capin writes her wonderfully). Whatever else they are, Elle and her “coven” have each other’s backs. These four girls, and the way they’re described, although poetic, reveals that they are a pretty terrifying bunch. I’m doubtful that this will appeal to boys, even though it does a pretty good job of laying out the complicity of even those who aren’t directly involved, and they’re the ones who need to see that. But readers looking for a revenge fantasy with sharp teeth won’t be disappointed. Recommended.

Contains: flashbacks to rape, sexual assault, abusive behaviors, bullying, transphobic bullying, brief depictions of suicide, substance abuse, cursing, violence, gore, murder.

Posted on September 3, 2019 by , Reply
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