Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

Reviews tagging 'Toxic relationship'

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

218 reviews

angorarabbit's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

There is a small spoiler regarding a early plot point in this review.

TLDR; I’m not really into horror or thrillers so take my review with a grain of salt. Improbable plot device, flat characters, little humour. Just enough interest to keep reading, though I was thinking of dnfing at the 60% point out of frustration.

Mr Hendrix tells the story as a third person narrator from the pov of the female main character. Thus we know almost nothing about the other characters, particularly the male ones. We learn almost nothing about the past of the fmc. Descriptions of places and things are also light. On the other hand the book felt too long to me, I was almost skimming when I got 60% to 80% in.

I have a few complaints about the novel but I’m keeping it to three.

One; If you come home from work one evening and find your elderly female neighbour is viscously attacking your spouse. In fact the neighbour has bitten your spouse’s earlobe off. When your spouse starts voicing suspicions about that neighbour’s great nephew newly arrived to take care of his now deceased great aunt do you ignore your spouse and form a friendship and business partnership with the nephew? Or do you encourage the local police to keep an eye on him and keep him out of your house away from your spouse and children?

Do your suspicions lessen or increase when a rat army invades your nice home and kills your mother?

Secondly why is every male in this book either non-existent or a jerk? Yes, I do complain when author’s female characters are poorly drawn. This book has the opposite problem and I’m not happy about that either.

Finally, there was humour in the first 11 chapters.. The humour disappeared with the rats in chapter 12 and never returned. (Do not read chapter 12 if you have musophobia.) While I wasn’t expecting a Christopher Moore style novel the humour of the first chapters did help to humanise characters some.

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tiernanhunter's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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sallysimply's review against another edition

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3.0

It started out fun, then got super dark and I rushed to finish it just so I could know how it all turned out. My main question is wtf are we supposed to make of the unquestioned Nazi fascination of it all?

Please check the content warnings on this. I wish I had known them ahead of time.

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kaylin830's review against another edition

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1.0

I was incredibly disappointed in this book. The beginning made it seem like we were going to be reading about badass mothers who don't take crap, who protect their children, who are afraid but are there for their kids when needed. Instead, we got spineless mothers who let their narcissistic asshat husbands walk all over them. The cherry on top is that it's only white women. I want a book about mothers of all races and backgrounds who want to bond over their love of books and the love of their children.

This book is set in the '90s. Tell me why these white women are terrified to go into a predominantly black neighborhood. Get a grip. You are there to talk to a specific person, not walk around willy-nilly. I don't even have words for how idiotic this is. You can not argue that the setting is the real world because the main villain is a vampire. That's fantasy, so make your world fit the prompt.

The biggest issue that I have with this book is not just that it's racist, but it is so disgustingly pedophilic. This vampire has a strict diet of black children. Hendrix could have made this because he feeds off of children to maintain his youth... except for the fact that his bite is "orgasmic". You're telling me that a book with MASSIVE racism, misleading summaries, and scenes of the vampire feeding off of children down by their genitalia, made it through a slew of revisions, editors, and publishers? This book is vile. I wish I had DNF'ed but I gave the book the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the mothers grow a backbone? Maybe they save the children out in Six Mile? Maybe just maybe they can defeat the vampire to save their town. Nope. Nada. You know the book is bad when the old senile woman is the most sane.

This book does not deserve to be sold out of my collection, it deserves to be thrown in a raging dumpster fire so that at least its death represents the contents.

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journeytoreader's review against another edition

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fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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dutchbaby's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

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billyjepma's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.25

For the first 50-100 pages, I was assuredly in this book's corner. The writing was snappy, the setting sharp, and the looming threat of something sinister palpable. It had me in the palm of its hand, and then only intermittently, and then not at all. Some of that degradation is due to the rises and falls of the suspense, which could be tiresome to wade through since Hendrix doesn't give his reader any space to second-guess the facts of what's happening in the story, lessening the suspense somewhat. It's a narrative decision I want to admire, and I did initially since it firmly places the women driving the story in the right. But after that story humiliated or tortured them for the umpteenth time, I struggled to see the point.

There are hints of promise, specifically in the strength of female friendship and solidarity, but Hendrix's writing is so rooted in a shallow faux-feminism that it sabotages the book at every turn. For one thing, he can't help but describe women's bodies in detail, even when the context would make such specificity frivolous at best. It's a symptom of a larger problem, though, and only gets worse as the story approaches the climax, where Hendrix resorts to the threat of sexual violence or the act itself to ramp up the tension in ways I found to be distasteful. The book wants to paint a picture of how men have historically abused women, treating them like objects or tools for their pleasure or pursuit of power. I'm all for that, especially in a "vampire" period piece like this. But when that book also has a habit of treating its women the same way as the men it condemns, any semblance of commentary quickly deteriorates.

It doesn't help that the characters are predominantly defined by their genders and the traits stereotypically associated with them. Those aren't bad traits for a character to have, mind you, but I struggle to believe that women in the era were exclusively defined by their roles as wives and mothers. The insistence on defining all these characters by different shades of those characteristics was disappointing, especially since Hendrix failed to give the women any interior lives or depth beyond the basest impulses projected onto them. At the very least, though, he knows his way around the genre, and his fast-paced, zippy writing makes this an easy page-turner. He also has a knack for setting up nail-biting scenarios that gross you out just as much as they keep you flipping pages. Granted, some of those scenarios end up falling into the same problems I had with the rest of the book, but the build-up was there, at least. If Hendrix had more self-awareness about his limits and strengths, this could've been a pulpy banger of a book, but alas.

None of these problems are unique to this book, though—I recognize many of his worst impulses from some of Stephen King's earlier works, alongside plenty of other male horror writers. But we (meaning white men like myself) can do better than this, and it's frustrating when I find books that seem to tell me otherwise.

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