The thought-proving parts of any book are one super effective way to make its readers invested and actually finish the book, whether they liked it or not. The first parts of the book (all parts, tbh) made me sooo annoyed with the lead, Patricia, that I finished the book earlier than expected. These days, because of work, it’s no news that I need at least a week to finish a novel. But The Southern Book Club’s made me finish in four days. (Nah, I just had some free time after I finished my monitoring engagements lol.)
Title: The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires
Author: Grady Hendrix
Genre: Horror, Fiction, Fantasy
My Review Rating: ★★★✰✰
Goodreads Synopsis:
Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the ’90s about a women’s book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a blood-sucking fiend.
Patricia Campbell had always planned for a big life, but after giving up her career as a nurse to marry an ambitious doctor and become a mother, Patricia’s life has never felt smaller. The days are long, her kids are ungrateful, her husband is distant, and her to-do list is never really done. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a group of Charleston mothers united only by their love for true-crime and suspenseful fiction. In these meetings, they’re more likely to discuss the FBI’s recent siege of Waco as much as the ups and downs of marriage and motherhood.
But when an artistic and sensitive stranger moves into the neighborhood, the book club’s meetings turn into speculation about the newcomer. Patricia is initially attracted to him, but when some local children go missing, she starts to suspect the newcomer is involved. She begins her own investigation, assuming that he’s a Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. What she uncovers is far more terrifying, and soon she–and her book club–are the only people standing between the monster they’ve invited into their homes and their unsuspecting community.
I was genuinely trying to like the protagonist, but every decision she made didn’t make sense. It made sense for the story, but not for a real-life housewife worried about her family’s safety, btw. I know, I know. If she didn’t act that way, we won’t have a book to read, but still. I am just not a fan of going to a creepy garden to check who-knows-what when I know it’s already creepy. I’d lock the doors instead. I am also not a fan of all James harris-related decisions she made including her lending a stranger, creepy-man-with-a-creepy-van Jim a few hundred bucks and being with him alone in HIS house. I am not a fan of her dragging all her friends to convince their husbands that their best buddy was a monster WITHOUT giving them proof even a weak, confusing one.
I understand she’s obsessed because of the haunting thought of her kids being Jim’s next victims but whatever she was doing made it even worse – her kids and husband felt distant from her, her son witnessing her “not-a-suicide” episode, her kids left at home or wherever they might be because she was so busy hunting this Jim. It’s a good thing she’s the protagonist and in every cliche novel or any story, our protagonist always wins in the end.
It was a slow-paced story from chapter 1-13. But in the last few chapters where the climax and horror was finally happening already, it became to so fast that I didn’t even get how it was called the book club’s “guide” to slaying a “vampire”.
I am giving this a 3 for now, but I am planning to re-read the book after some more vampire- or monster-themed horror books which I have no idea when. It’s in the top 3 Goodreads Choice Awards in 2020, but it has 3 point something rating as ofthis review so…
