After enjoying Grady Hendrix’s latest novel, The Final Girl Support Group, I knew I needed to check out more of his work. Luckily, my local library had another one of his novels in stock! After reading The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, Hendrix has definitely earned himself a spot on my favorite authors list.
This horror novel focuses on, you guessed it, a book club made up of southern ladies. We more specific get to spend time in Patricia’s headspace. She’s a stay at home mom to a younger child and a young teen, while her husband works an abundance of hours as a psychiatrist, while his dementia-suffering mother lives with them. She loves her friends in her book club: Kitty, Maryellen, Slick, and Grace, and she especially loves the books they read in the club – all horror and true crime novels. It’s her chance once a month to kick back, relax, and talk about psychopaths. All of the excitement in the books they read makes Patricia wish some excitement happened in their well-to-do neighborhood.
Well, be careful what you wish for, Patricia! Not too long after her desire for some action, she gets attacked by an old woman in the neighborhood who seems downright feral. Soon after, she meets the woman’s great-nephew, James Harris. I love how is referred to in his full name throughout the entirety of the novel. He seems nice at first, but then all of her fiction reading starts to tell her that James Harris is bad news. Especially after Patricia’s mother-in-law dies a horrific death, and she starts hearing about small children committing suicide in a nearby town. The real nail in the coffin (so to speak) is when she sees James Harris feeding on a small girl in the woods! What more proof does Patricia need than that?! Too bad everyone around her, book club ladies included, thinks she’s lost it.
Three years after a suicide attempt because she’d essentially lost her mind with people not believing her, and trusting James Harris, her life is pretty much back to normal. She’s still leery of James Harris, but she sees what a positive impact he’s made on all of the important people in her life. That’s when she sees the ghost of her mother-in-law, who inspires her to start re-investigating James Harris. After getting some pretty damning evidence, her friends are finally back on her side and help her take down this monster (vampire) once and for all!
I absolutely loved the trajectory of this story. Poor Patricia just wanted to do right by the children and it took over three years to get it done. Another thing I enjoyed about the novel was how the story moved forward and was sectioned off based on different popular horror novels. Too bad I’ve never actually read any of them…maybe someday. With another novel so engrossing, I can’t wait to get my hands on all of Hendrix’s other works. I was even more excited to learn that the rights to this novel have been picked up for a series, and that Hendrix will be involved! I smell a success coming! If you like a good thriller, I encourage you to check out this book and all of his others, too.