The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

My last Grady Hendrix review was somewhat scathing. A combination of personal taste, weaker characters, and confusing promotion made How to Sell a Haunted House a disappointment. When I finished it, I was still seeking a proper Grady Hendrix high, so I turned to his other release - The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires.

I'd put it off for a few reasons: it was understandably expensive on first release, and vampires aren't a big draw for me anyway. By the time it drifted down to a more manageable price, I was more excited about How to Sell a Haunted House and figured I'd get them together.

I knew at once that this book was what I was looking for. 

In the opening, Hendrix discusses how it's a spiritual successor to the brilliant My Best Friend's Exorcism. It's not a sequel, but it's in roughly the same community a few years later, The 80s Satanic Panic has given way to 90s Prozac yuppiedom; but the women are still trapped in an old-South suburban femininity that might as well be the 1950s, for all their lives have changed.

I wanted to pit a man freed from all responsibilities but his appetites against women whose lives are shaped by their endless responsibilities. I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom. - Grady Hendrix

Patricia is a put-upon housewife, with young children and a self-important doctor husband. In addition to running the house, meeting her husband's needs, and looking after two young children and a dog, she's also been lumbered with the care work for her mother-in-law. When she and several other women are expelled from book club for not having had time to read a pretentious book, they create one of their own, focusing on grisly true-crime and other 'trashy' reads. For a while it's all very Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants meets Steel Magnolias, as the women bond and help each other through various troubles.

Then a stranger called James Harris arrives in their community, along with many odd events. Patricia is attacked when an elderly neighbour turns feral, her mother-in-law has visions and rants that this stranger killed her daddy, a local housekeeper goes missing, and hundreds of rats swarm the house.

This is a love letter to the original Dracula. These are ordinary, if privileged, people whose lives are so normal that it seems hard to believe, even as a reader, that anything supernatural could be happening. The stifling gothic Victorian atmosphere has been swapped for the hum of dryers on a hot day and a community so tight that it suffocates. Hendrix manages to keep all the traditional features of vampires, while making Harris just different enough to sew doubt and confusion. 

 

Where Dracula sought to become accepted by English society (via his books), Harris is initially 

accepted into the community via Patricia and the book club. The problem is that, as a white man who helps to make their husbands rich, James Harris immediately overtakes the women in the societal pecking order. Their reasonable doubts, and attempt to contact the police, lead to them being dressed down like schoolgirls by their husbands. Soon Patricia's sanity is in doubt, and with it comes the judgement of her friends and the resentment of her children. James has the husbands under his spell, and - whether out of denial or desperation - the women of the book club abandon Patricia.  

I've found myself thinking this before, but Hendrix gets women. It would have been so easy for him to make the female characters two-dimensional, whether as pawns of their husbands or just bitchy society women. Instead it feels like every woman in this is negotiating her own leading role, playing a cautious game of femininity on a complex chess board of society. 

 

Patricia is a work of careful genius. Her suspicion of James is quick and she never wavers in her determination. Even when she is - for a time - forced into accepting him, it take very little for her to return to the fight. It would have been so easy to make her passive, and yet even in her most gaslit, helpless moments she doesn't stay down for long. Her attempt to break into James' house is one of the most tense horror scenes I've experienced, and even after hiding in his attic for hours with a corpse, knowing he'll be back any second, she still has enough nerve to hoover her dirty footprints off the carpet.

One of my criticisms of Hendrix's previous books has been the focus on white characters, and that is addressed here. James Harris primarily attacks black children in the black part of Charleston, an area that our main character is scared to even visit. It becomes clear that James has been to the area in the 20s, and that his actions led directly to a disabled black man's lynching. Like the original Dracula, James knows how to exploit the vulnerable for his own benefit.

 

Patricia's white privilege is addressed in several ways - with her own lack of power being directly opposed to Mrs. Greene's (correct) insistence that as a wealthy white woman, Patricia has more ability to stop the attacks, and has more responsibility to step up as a result. It sometimes makes for hard reading, with even likable characters making off-hand remarks, dismissing the missing black women, and being all too willing to ignore the deaths of black children in the face of financial or marital problems. Patricia is better than most, yet she still has the luxury of choosing whether or not to pay attention.

At it's heart, this book is about the dirty and uncredited work that women do. Whether it's the bloody, primal business of childbirth, gynaecological issues, period pain, the mental sacrifices of marriage, the cleaning up of piss, the cooking, cleaning and shopping, the care-work, the disciplining, the children who you love but don't always like, or the endless negotiation of a world designed for men... these women are fighting on all fronts, all the time. 

The end of the book has to be one of the goriest vampire killings ever described, as - for lack of any other way of ending him - the woman butcher James into tiny pieces while he's still awake. They don't like doing it, but someone has to, and - as with so many other problems - it falls to them.

The message is never 'oh aren't women great, look at the way the sisterhood has each other's backs'. These women are as self-serving, deluded and human as any man. The difference is that when the really messy work has to be done, they'll do it and no one will even notice.