Reviews with content warning for Violence - Guía del club de lectura para matar vampiros

Don’t let the lighthearted title fool you, this one gets very dark!

45.

Patricia Campbell is a dutiful and sheltered housewife in a Southern small town in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Her one night of escapism is her monthly book club with four other housewives from her neighbourhood, where they drink wine, gossip, and discuss gruesome true and fictional crime reads. When James Harris moves to town, Patricia tries to be a welcoming and friendly neighbour, but from their first meeting there’s just something untrustworthy and off putting about him that she just can’t shake. And the more James inserts himself into her life, and those of her family and friends, the more uncomfortable Patricia feels. And children are changing…

An engaging, absorbing, riveting read. The prologue sucked me right in, and the references and tie-in to My Best Friend’s Exorcism has me even more excited to read that one. The author excelled at writing tense, nail-biting, claustrophobic, heart-pounding, nightmarish scenes. But then the next chapter would see me snorting out loud, which I was grateful for as it gave me a chance to calm down. The final showdown had me glued to the audio, and the ending was poignant and satisfying. The variation on the vampire myth was unique and different. It could’ve been a 5-star read, but unfortunately there were a couple of scenes that were too much for me (see next paragraph), although I understand why they were included as James was a vicious blood-sucking creature with zero humanity who relished exerting control and power over the main characters. I really warmed to Patricia and her friends, and their struggles to come to terms with the evil surrounding them, their setbacks, and struggles to remain loyal to one another. The novel was set mainly in the 90’s, although the first two chapters took place in 1988 explaining how the book club came to be. These characters submissiveness to their husbands and the misogyny of the men reminded me more of the 1950’s although I understand that there were pockets of the South like this in the 90’s and it worked well for this novel further isolating the women, and fuelling their fear that they wouldn’t be believed, and that there was no help to be found outside of one another.

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires was something of an enigma. Because if you happened to sample the first couple of chapters on say Amazon, you could mistakenly buy it thinking it was going to be on the lighter side of horror because a lot of the novel was entertaining, fun, and amusing. Until it wasn’t. Things took a turn in the third chapter, we’re talking blood, gore, and mutilation. And it didn’t stop there. There was a chapter straight out of James Herbert’s first novel (true horror novel fans will get this reference and it was a cool tribute), and for those who are squeamish or phobic when it comes to cockroaches, spiders, or bugs in general, I advise you to give this book a wide berth. And there’s more. Around the 75% mark, the novel went in an even darker direction, and I now understand why some readers/reviewers gave up at this point.

I listened to most of the book via Libby and the narrator, Bahni Turpin, completely and utterly brought these characters to life. Bravo! For those who can get past the above trigger warnings I highly recommend The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires on audio. I am thrilled to have found a new horror author in Grady Hendrix.

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etaypoe's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

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

3.5

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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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tomasalbanez's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

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

5.0

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bites_of_books's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious sad tense fast-paced

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

3.75

This was quite a surprising book for me, in many ways. Previously I've loved How to Sell a Haunted House and did not like Final Girls Support Group so, this was supposed to be in tie breaker. I find myself in the middle. I think this book had a great atmosphere for a book that brings horror into suburbia. I did not love how Mrs. Greene was more of a secondary character and would have loved for her to be the main character here (especially since she ends up doing most of the work herself). I did like the discussion on race and privilege, but there could have been some more action in giving Mrs. Greene more agency than she had, instead of making her to passive until Patricia finally decided to do something.
Overall a good book for the fall season but be prepared for really horrific scenes dealing with abuse (of all kinds), vermin, gore, etc.

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judassilver's review against another edition

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dark funny mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

3.0

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