24 August 2024
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix was recommended to me by a few fantasy writers in my residency workshop at the end of last month. There are 654,321 other books on my reading list, but why not? My brain wanted something mindless, and it’s a New York Times best-selling novel, so it was just what the doctor ordered.
Grady Hendrix lives in Manhattan, has published numerous fiction novels, three nonfiction books, and has written for such periodicals as Playboy Magazine, The New York Post, and The New York Sun. As any successful writer seems to be, he is prolific—and busy.
To be fair, I think Hendrix’s busyness shows a little bit in this story. It is as they say (or Voltaire is credited to say): Perfect is the enemy of good. The book contains many minor plot errors, such as the removed bandage (58) followed by a throbbing bandaged ear (60) and a stolen wallet (85) followed by the same wallet being left at home (86). It also contains three or four repeated usages of the cliché “ice water flooded her veins” in varying manifestations and at least two repetitions of “a black rectangle of night” representing a bedroom window. Finally, there were many dropped threads. For example, James runs off, but we don’t really know what emergency happened at the Cay for multiple chapters, and when it is finally mentioned, there is no elaboration or explanation. It’s sort of a flimsy excuse. None of these, in themselves, are truly problematic to the story; it’s just that each error or cliché pulled me out of the plot and made me wonder how many beta readers/editors he’d employed—and whether he should fire them. Such interruptions broke the story’s momentum for me and sent my mind on tangents about the writing process itself. Plus, the book club bonus material at the end felt forced, even sales-pitch-y.
While vampirism may be a tired subject and I don’t believe anyone could improve upon Anne Rice’s legacy, Hendrix did well to make it fresh by setting it in Mount Pleasant, Charleston, South Carolina (as opposed to Rice’s Creole New Orleans) amongst a handful of mostly useless housewives in the 1990s (maybe that’s not fair—they were heroines even if it took them years to get there). He also gave his new-aged vampire some unique qualities and tendencies, factors which invited curiosity, mystery, and interest.
One point of instruction, one reverberating lesson from my most recent residency was how to employ the third person and “head-hop” between main characters. Doing so permits the author to provide the reader with multiple perspectives of an event—or even show what is happening in two different places simultaneously. The problem new writers encounter is that head-hopping within a single scene is too confusing for the reader. Hendrix handles this well. For the most part, this is Patricia’s story, and we are in Patricia’s lived experience (to include some limited interiority about what she thinks, what she wants, what she fears, etc.). However, in Chapter 12, when Miss Mary is attacked by rats, the story bounces back and forth between Mrs. Greene’s perspective (at the house, fighting rats) and Patricia’s perspective (at Grace’s birthday party, up the street). Hendrix handles this well by providing space, or section breaks, for each transition between Miss Mary and Patricia’s heads. I think this is the only time/chapter in the novel where Hendrix employs this technique to head-hop, and I do wonder why he felt it so important to do so, but it works.
Everything else I have to say about the book is pure opinion, so neither here nor there. In truth, I didn’t really like the book. Most of the characters in the story felt flat and underdeveloped. Our protagonist, Patricia, is a total pushover for four years of the book; she has no faith whatsoever in herself, to the point that she gaslights herself into not believing what she’s seen with her own two eyes. Of course, there are people like this out there in the real world, people-pleasers and codependents, but it was grating for me to read. Also…could you imagine telling your friends something that happened to you and they don’t believe you?? Shit. That’s just straight up gaslighting, and nearly every character in the book does it to Patricia for years!
The 1950s housewife mentality that was still relevant in Mt Pleasant in the 1990s too much resembles that of the USAF military spouse. I suppose I can value it more now that I have some distance from it…but still, it is a lifestyle that feels regressive and restrictive. While it was a familiar space for me to inhabit for the book, it was not a comfortable or desirable one. That said, Hendrix did an excellent job of infusing his story with this setting so that it became Gothic in its own unique way. The south is just perfectly suited to the American gothic.
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