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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 9845670" data-attributes="member: 11760">I just finished Grady Hendrix's Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires.This was my first Hendrix book and, based on his other titles, I was expecting this to be a modern take on a salacious 1970s horror paperback. Instead, it's something both less and more ambitious.The plot outline is absolutely the most bog standard vampire tale, with a mysterious and charismatic figure insinuating himself into a community, suspicious activity happening, the protagonist figuring out something is wrong, but the vampire relies on key elements of the local environment to throw off suspicion, isolating the protagonist until it's almost too late to stop them, when they're able to rally some friends and fight back.That's the plot of dozens of vampire stories, including Fright Night. In the Fright Night remake (which is excellent), Jerry the Vampire uses a rapidly emptying suburban housing tract during the 2008 housing crisis as cover for his murders. Did the neighbors vanish overnight because they were killed by a vampire or because they were running from creditors?In Southern Book Club, what the vampire uses is the political/cultural climate in early 1990s Charleston, South Carolina, where White suburban women are expected to be housewives obsessed with propriety and maintaining a pleasant facade for the outside world, where even the women don't take each other seriously, and where the lives of Black people, especially Black women, are someone else's problem and ignored by both the authorities and White society in general.So the vampire is able to prey on Black children without fear of police or larger Charleston society getting involved and when the White protagonist steps up, her friends mostly crumble in the face of their husbands getting embarrassed by the commotion they're causing. The book club of the title are first and foremost victims of the patriarchy, although they'd be never identify it as such, and are complicit in Charleston's low level racism that allows the vampire to kill multiple children that we know about.Hendrix's mother grew up in a world like this (as did my mom), and the book isn't unsympathetic towards these women, but recognizes that they're victims as well. It's a different kind of feminist vampire story than Lucy Undying, which I read last year, but in some ways more powerful. It's easy to be a feminist character in horror when you're a century-old vampire or the heir to a big British estate and fabulously beautiful. It's a lot harder when you're a housewife with a crappy husband, two obnoxious teenaged kids and friends who only have your back so long as their husbands are OK with it.Strongly recommended. I'll definitely be reading more Grady Hendrix in future.</blockquote>

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