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

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin

Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins
Publisher: Quirk Books & Blackstone Publishing (Audio)
Publication Date: April 7, 2020  

 

Format: Audible Audiobook
Source: Bought with credits.

Rating:







Goodreads Synopsis: 

Fried Green Tomatoes and "Steel Magnolias" meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the '90s about a women's book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a blood-sucking fiend.

Patricia Campbell had always planned for a big life, but after giving up her career as a nurse to marry an ambitious doctor and become a mother, Patricia's life has never felt smaller. The days are long, her kids are ungrateful, her husband is distant, and her to-do list is never really done. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a group of Charleston mothers united only by their love for true-crime and suspenseful fiction. In these meetings, they're more likely to discuss the FBI's recent siege of Waco as much as the ups and downs of marriage and motherhood.

But when an artistic and sensitive stranger moves into the neighborhood, the book club's meetings turn into speculation about the newcomer. Patricia is initially attracted to him, but when some local children go missing, she starts to suspect the newcomer is involved. She begins her own investigation, assuming that he's a Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. What she uncovers is far more terrifying, and soon she--and her book club--are the only people standing between the monster they've invited into their homes and their unsuspecting community.

Review: 

WOW! What a roller coaster this book was. I picked up this book because it has been on my radar for a bit and the synopsis is very intriguing...and then a YouTuber that I follow was reading it for her online book club so I picked up the audiobook and I am SO glad that I did. 

I should note that this book needs a few warnings - it is grotesque, gore-filled, and there should be a trigger warning for sexual abuse, physical abuse, self-harm, and suicide. There is also A LOT of violence. 

On to the review:

First off, the narrator is amazing, really brought all the characters to life and the normal 1x pace was very good.  I should also lead with I did not realize that this author was male.

The whole story was very good as well. It kept me on my toes and even though it would seem straightforward, it had me guessing in some parts and second-guessing what I knew, I love when books can do that.

The book is set in the early '90s and for a while there I really thought that it was set MUCH earlier than that. I have lived in Georgia previously but was much younger and it never occurred to me to look out how women acted and were treated at that time, but I felt like the women in this town/story/book were so controlled by their husbands and it was sad and I felt icky about it.

I hated ALL the men in the story, but I also really hated a lot of the women too because they depended so fully on their men and I understand that was the way of the world for a long time but it was off-putting. The win for this book was the relationships between the women, this book club was amazing. Together they were strong and strong-willed, they could take on the world. I loved the relationship between these women and how they helped each other, but also how they were real with one another. They were struggling with life and that felt so true and so meaningful to have them come together in this way. I am not saying they were the realest they could have been but it was pretty good.

The end of this book became very sexualized and it seemed like the author just wanted the easy why out in the end, so why not just make it all sexual right? BUT that said it kind of was the ending that the story needed, there seemed to be a bunch of pent up sexual energy in the book so this was the outlet for it I guess.

There was SO much that I didn't like, that I felt ick about, but the overall story and the way it all came together and how those feelings added to the plot was really well done and I LOVED this book. So my love/hate relationship made this a win for me. It was weird, it was emotion producing, it was me screaming at the characters for wins and loses, it was A LOT!

... I think that is it for now... I don't want to go into full plot details because it is good to go into this not knowing a lot of what you are getting...