bookheaven | The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

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

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have to face facts, Hendrix has to join my short list of authors whose blurbs are exactly what I want in a book and whose writing style is just plain nope. I'm not saying it's a bad book. It's just not for me but that said this does have actual real problems. For one, this is the pettiest, internally ugly group of women I've seen since...well the last Hendrix book I've read (I literally can not tell if Hendrix really likes women and keeps making them the leads or if it's exactly the opposite)

It opens late 80s/early 90s with a pretentious book club where the main character, Patricia, doesn't fit in. After a blow up there she and a few of the others make their own club reading true crime for the most part. Patricia is at a blah part of her life. Her husband's always working, her kids are teens with their own lives and she's mostly stuck caring for her mother in law with dementia. Into this comes an attack on her by an elderly neighbor which leads Patricia to meeting James who is an odd duck. How odd do you ask? Points toward the title.

I was so bored by the time James even gets into the picture I almost didn't care. But what did stand out to me was the fact that Patricia has a rather substantial injury after that attack and literally almost no one cares. It's her first clue to get new friends/husband/something. But there is a whiff of misogyny running through the whole book especially where the husbands are concerned.

I was also very off put by how much attention was put toward the women's bodies, especially the old naked saggy ones. It was creepy and weird. Yeah, I just didn't care for this but I'll admit I'm in the minority so don't take my word for it. A lot of people really enjoyed it,

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