{"id":143363,"date":"2020-12-14T10:00:34","date_gmt":"2020-12-14T15:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/?p=143363"},"modified":"2020-12-10T12:51:06","modified_gmt":"2020-12-10T17:51:06","slug":"rachel-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/?p=143363","title":{"rendered":"Rachel Reviews: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires – Grady Hendrix"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"\"I\u2019ve been, shall we say\u2026 intrigued<\/em> by the book cover for The Southern Book Club\u2019s Guide to Slaying Vampires<\/a><\/em> since I first heard about it back in February, and then even more so when I realized that Grady Hendrix was the author of a handful of books that have piqued my interest on more than one occasion (including My Best Friend\u2019s Exorcism<\/a><\/em>, We Sold Our Souls<\/a><\/em>, Horrorst\u00f6r<\/a><\/i>, and Paperbacks from Hell<\/a><\/em>). I borrowed the book from the library sometime in August but never got around to actually reading it until I needed a palate cleanser between How to Be an Antiracist<\/a><\/em> and The New Jim Crow<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

But, like all good books, I shouldn\u2019t have waited so long.<\/p>\n

With a title like The Southern Book Club\u2019s Guide to Slaying Vampires<\/em>, it\u2019s not a surprise when a vampire eventually shows up\u2014nor is it entirely unwarranted when Patricia assumes her strange new neighbor might actually be<\/em> one. (This is fiction after all.) But, like all my favorite vampire novels, the best part isn\u2019t just the gory, blood-soaked standoff at the end: it\u2019s the little moments that lead you there and all the second-guessing along the way.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite parts was the true-crime book club Patricia starts with some of the other housewives in her neighborhood. The club forms the backbone of the novel and, once its overtaken by the women\u2019s husbands and blown up into a town-wide social affair, just another metaphorical thread that ties the plot together. There\u2019s a lot of icky, not great stuff that happens throughout the novel, but one of the worst involved all the husbands forcing their wives\u2014after said wives believed and supported Patricia against James Harris\u2014to not only apologize but also embrace him as one of their own. The amount of manipulation and gaslighting that occurred just put this pit<\/em> in my stomach that only went away at the end (in, yes, a very satisfying gory, blood-soaked standoff).<\/p>\n

The Southern Book Club\u2019s Guide to Slaying Vampires<\/em> is a long book at just over 400 pages but, by the last third or fourth, I found myself curled up on the sofa in a reading cocoon, content to only get up once I\u2019d finished. It\u2019s a genre book but also not one, too. Hendrix writes in his author\u2019s note that \u201cwhen I was a kid I didn\u2019t take my mom seriously\u201d and I found myself returning to the quote at the end. There are so many instances where Patricia isn\u2019t taken seriously as a woman, as a wife, as a mother, or as a friend; where her mother-in-law, Ruth, is brushed off as senile; or where Ruth\u2019s caretaker, Mrs. Greene, is silenced because of her skin color and where she lives\u2026 and then so many instances where all three women are proved correct.<\/p>\n

It might have taken Patricia a little longer than I\u2019d hoped for her to put her foot down and for Patricia\u2019s husband and neighbor to get what they deserved\u2026 but, oh, what a comeuppance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been, shall we say\u2026 intrigued by the book cover for The Southern Book Club\u2019s Guide to Slaying Vampires since I first heard about it back in February, and then even more so when I realized that Grady Hendrix was the author of a handful of books that have piqued my interest on more than…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":143364,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","category-rachel-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/The-Southern-Book-Clubs-Guide-to-Slaying-Vampires.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":false,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6V6sR-Bij","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=143363"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":143366,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143363\/revisions\/143366"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/143364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=143363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=143363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danverslibrary.org\/readthis\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=143363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}