Mini Review | The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

⭐⭐⭐ 3/5 Great audiobook and an entertaining satire of ’90s horror

Format: Audio (BorrowBox)

Read: March 2023

This was brilliant in the audio format as the narrator (Bahni Turpin) is really fantastic, and really helped me get into the setting.

As for the story it is an entertaining satire of the 90s horror genre (it seems like some of the top negative reviews for this book have tried hard to step around this point for likes and comments!).

Yes there is a lot of misogyny but it is set in the 90s very much in the white, wealthy suburban South, and it is acknowledged and satirised, it is in fact the biggest roadblock to the plot. Some of it is internalised by the characters and some of them try to push against it. I thought this actually made them more relatable and believable.

Yes there are a lot of POC who get murdered by the vampire which, again, is I think the point. The vampire intentionally preys on vulnerable people that won’t draw a lot of attention from the authorities, the press, or the white, wealthy people on the other side of town that he is ingratiating himself with. The white housewives are shown to have racist attitudes to varying degrees, and are only finally motivated to fight back when one of their own children is threatened. The book does make a point of this – especially though Mrs Green, the black housekeeper, who is arguably the real hero of the book.

At the end of the day it is an entertaining story and a solid three stars.

My negatives would be that the plot gets a bit slow in places, there could be better and more representation from POC as we only really have Mrs Green, and there were just a few too many descriptions of public hair for my personal comfort! (Perhaps I notice that more in audio format!). The scene with Corey (who is 17 at the time) I felt slid over the line into sexualisation in an unnecessary way.

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires on Amazon.

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