Review - The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires
Grady Hendrix
Quirk Books, 8 April 2020
Available as HB, e, 408pp
Read as: ARC
ISBN 9781683691433

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires to consider for review.

This book is, as Hendrix notes, a follow-up, not a sequel, to My Best Friend's Exorcism (which should be enough for you to snap it up) with the same setting.

Here, the focus is on the adults, specifically the mothers, who keep everything moving for their kids and their husbands. A few of them - Patricia, Grace, Kitty, Maryellen and Slick - have formed a book club, alternating fiction with True Crime - which generally tells how serial killers come into polite, safe neighbourhoods like theirs and remain undetected. It's a release for Patricia, a former nurse, who married Carter, an ambitious but absent doctor. She loves her children, Korey and Blue, but is feeling squeezed out of her life and deserving of a little excitement... be careful what you wish for, Patricia!

Something will, obviously, come to this particular peaceful, safe neighbourhood. Hendrix's title promises nothing less. We're primed to expect bloodsucking creates, slaughter, and peril. And the book doesn't disappoint. But Hendrix gives us so much more.

I realised when I read this book that I'm accustomed, at some level, for the vampire vs vampire-hunter struggle to be a clash of the privileged - the aristocratic Count against the Professor, the Doctor, the Priest (all male of course). When Van Helsing sets out on the trail, nobody tells him that he's hysterical or "needs help".

In The Southern Book Club's Guide... everything is bound up with privilege and patriarchy. The comfortably off, white, women of the Book Club are nonetheless bound to their husbands. They're not considered to need their own bank accounts. Hubby's views always come first and if a wife steps out of line, why, there's a little pill for that. Or a swinging fist.

At one level, reviewing this book, I feel it ought to have a couple of content warnings for domestic violence, coercive control and even rape. Yes, there's also more conventional gore and some creepy scenes with rats, but in a sense the real horror of this book is how the intruding, monstrous power makes itself at home in this nest of male privilege, finding allies and protectors, so that when Patricia and co try to take action - to protect their children, and others' children - they are firmly, cruelly brought back into line. This is vampire fiction which is not just a vendetta between monster and avenging hunter, it is deeply, richly social, showing how established order, prejudice, and power structures let the monsters loose among us.

Hendrix takes things further. The victims in this book are, for the most part, not the privileged white kids of the Old Village but the inhabitants of Six Mile - the district where the people of colour live, a place the fine ladies of the book club are nervous to visit. The police don't look too closely when children from there go missing and end up dead. And this isn't some aberration - in a bit of backstory (the story, in fact, behind that creepy cover image) we find out that what's going on here is part of a pattern.

So, in this book, there is a satisfying degree of moral murk. A lot of handwringing, a lot of looking the other way, of letting the bad things happen somewhere else, to someone else. There is actually a great deal of moral horror here, and it is more frightening, more disturbing and sticks around longer than the scenes with blood, combat and injury.

This is horror told in depth and detail, well grounded in a particular time and place (and Hendrix emphasises that by letting the story develop over years). The ladies of the Southern Book Club are redoubtable, and the story celebrates their courage and the friendship they find under pressure. But they are not invulnerable, and some wounds don't heal.

Recommended without hesitation.

More more information about the book, see the publisher's website here.

My Best Friend's Exorcism

Today I'm welcoming author Grady Hendrix, for a stop on the My Best Friend's Exorcism blog tour.

About Grady

Grady lives in New York. He is the author of Horrorstör, a novel about a haunted IKEA store, which is being turned into a series by Gail Berman (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and Josh Schwartz (Gossip Girl). Previously a journalist. He is also a co-founder of the New York Asian Film Festival.

Visit his website www.gradyhendrix.com or follow him on Twitter @grady_hendrix to find out more.

About the book

High school friends Abby and Gretchen have been BFFs since fifth grade, when they bonded over E.T. and roller-skating. They’ve shared secrets, a deep love of pop music, and inside jokes - until one fateful evening involving skinny-dipping and trying acid. Suddenly Gretchen is a completely different person - and to make things worse, strange things keep happening whenever she’s nearby.

Dumbstruck by the drastic changes in her best friend, Abby investigates what has happened, bringing her into contact with some bizarre characters and ultimately leading her to a horrifying explanation: Gretchen is possessed by the Devil. Friends, relatives and teachers all dismiss Abby’s discovery, begging the ultimate question: can Gretchen and Abby’s friendship survive Satan?

Like an unholy hybrid of Beaches, Mean Girls and The Exorcist, My Best Friend’s Exorcism blends teen angst, adolescent drama, unspeakable horrors, and a mix of 80s pop songs into a pulse-pounding supernatural thriller. Packaged in a high school yearbook format, replete with handwritten inscriptions on the endpapers, this is a must-have for any genre fan - or 80s nostalgia - from Heathers to horror.

Now the preliminaries are over - here's Grady to reminisce about his high school years...

HIGH SCHOOL HIGHS AND LOWS

There’s a reason My Best Friend’s Exorcism is set in 1988: that’s the year I was in Tenth Grade (Year 11) when I felt like I was possessed by a demon from Hell. I wasn’t literally possessed (or was I?) but I felt like everything I was doing was going wrong, and every second I was alive was just another chance for me to mess up my life forever. It was also the year when I forged the tight friendships that got me through high school alive. Here are a few truths that got me through the highs and lows of high school.

EVERYONE IS UGLY - I was a spotty little monster with a face that looked like an overcooked pizza. I spent hours picking at it, popping it, staring into the mirror and wanting to tear it off. I looked around at my classmates and saw either golden gods walking the earth in clouds of perfection, or hideous trolls scuttling from class to class like monsters. I firmly believed I belonged to the latter camp, but looking back at high school students as an adult I realize they’re all so half-formed that they’re all ugly. I shouldn’t have worried.

ADULTS ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS - minus a few rare exceptions, the faculty who ran my high school were the enemy. They were not out to help us, they were out to humble us. I remember being punished for things I didn’t do simply because a teacher believed I must have, I remember having my confusion over maths interpreted as sarcasm because the teacher couldn’t believe “a student is this stupid,” and I remember telling our guidance counselor where I wanted to go to university and having her burst into laughter. At the time I thought I was the problem. As an adult, I realize that they were the enemy all along.

THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A HIGH SCHOOL FRIENDSHIP - the friendships you form in high school are the tightest ones of your life. Later you’ll have husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, but in high school you’ve got comrades in arms who have your back and vow to stick together forever. These are the friendships that keep you alive, that bail you out when you’re in trouble, that come through with a last minute rescue. And they don’t survive graduation. There’s something about their intensity that causes these friendships to fall apart once you’re out of school. Sometimes you can transform them into another type of relationship, and there will always be a residual nostalgic buzz between you, but in general, they fade away. And that’s all right.

NO ONE CARES WHAT YOU LEARN - no one really cares if you can tell them about the Tudors or what X equals. Schools are not designed to give you information, they are designed to see if you can take tests and toe the line. Schools are places where you’re taught how to conform. Future employers and university admissions committees (where the real learning takes place) want to see if you can follow rules, do work, handle stress, and keep your cool while being bombarded with a baffling assortment of trivia for a decade. I mean, let’s face it, after learning how to read and write and do simple maths, what did you actually find useful in high school? Chances are, it was something you taught yourself.

As bad as high school was, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. As much as we all make fun of teenagers — and they can be embarrassing — they’re better than the adults we grow into. Everything felt like a matter of life and death back then because it was. In high school, we’re stupid, and inexperienced, and we look funny, but we all wore our hearts on our sleeves and we weren’t afraid to risk everything, every single day. I wish I was half as brave today.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism is out now in hardback from Quirk Books, £14.99 and is available at your local bookshop, and also here, here and here.