The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

by Grady Hendrix

When a couple of housewives decide to start a book club to change up their daily routines, a complete stranger turns up to their village and manages to completely integrate into their lives. Not many questions are asked, but Patricia Campbell smells something fishy about it. Strange things are happening and she leads them all back to this newcomer. Patricia seeks support from her book club members to try and prove this stranger's wrongdoings, but the men of the house stop them to protect their reputations and financial status, which were built with the help of our newcomer.

Things turn out badly for Patricia and she manages to completely destroy her believability towards her own family and the members of the community, despite her best efforts.

Will she manage to make her community realise this stranger is dangerous to their families? Or will they surrender to his hunger?

This book wasn't on my personal tbr, but I read it for Courtney's Cosy Bookclub read of September.

It was an interesting suspenseful read for me, a genre that I normally don't pick up. I generally enjoyed the fast pace of the book and the fact that it kept me wanting to know what will happen.

But next to that, I'm not sure how to feel about this. I read a couple of other reviews and they are quite wide-ranged. Some note the sexism and racism, others praise everything about it. I did absolutely not feel comfortable reading that the opinions of the housewives were completely disregarded by their own husbands and that black characters aren't even addressed with their first names. I recon, this is done to depict the '80s-'90s mindset and reality, but those feelings made me like the book less. The fact that there is a book club mentioned in a book I'm reading for my book club is, however, pretty amazing!

If you don't like a lot of gore or reading about people being belittled by sexism and racism, this book might not be for you.

But all in all, the story is pretty compelling and fast paced, I somehow managed to finish it in only a week, but it wasn't very special in my eyes. Hence, my three star rating.