The Southern Peach Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires

Happy Halloween! If you’ve been around for a while, you know that Halloween is my favourite time of year. Well, tied with Christmas. So, I’ve been having a fantastic month! A very, very busy month, but a great spooky season all the same. And despite being so busy, I’ve still been reading away. I’m up to 51 books so far this year! To review this month, I chose a spooky book that’s been on my TBR for years: Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. And to accompany this month’s review, I made a Southern Peach cocktail.

Southern Peach Recipe

1oz Southern Comfort

1oz Peach Schnapps

3oz Cranberry Juice

1oz Lime Juice

0.5oz Grenadine*

1 Lime Wedge

*This is an optional ingredient.

In a cocktail shaker with ice, add all ingredients and shake. Strain into an ice-filled collins glass, garnish, and enjoy! I forgot to buy a lime to garnish with, oops!

This one was good! It’s sweet with a little bite at the back of the throat from the liquor. My special ingredient this month is grenadine. I planned to use Southern Comfort (SoCo) as my ingredient, but it was already part of the drink I chose. So, I went with something easy instead—grenadine AKA fake blood. And I think the idea behind that is obvious, fake blood, vampires, you get it. This was already a pretty sweet drink and the grenadine just adds to that sweetness. However, I’m not a fan of SoCo, so a little extra sweetness wasn’t a negative for me. But it’s something to note for yourself if you’re not a sweet drink person.

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires Synopsis

(from book cover)

Patricia Campbell’s life has never felt smaller. Her husband is a workaholic, her teenage kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she’s always a step behind on her endless to-do list. The only thing keeping her sane is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime. At these meetings they’re as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are about their own families.

One evening after book club, Patricia is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbor, bringing the neighbor’s handsome nephew, James Harris, into her life. James is well traveled and well read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn’t felt in years. But when children on the other side of town go missing, their deaths written off by local police, Patricia has reason to believe James Harris is more of a Bundy than a Brad Pitt. The real problem? James is a monster of a different kind—and Patricia has already invited him in. 

Review

I have been looking forward to reading this book for years! That cover is just gorgeous, this was a big Instagram book, and I enjoy the author. And I think this one lived up to the hype. And while it’s not the best book I’ve read this year, I really enjoyed it. It was fun, intriguing, fast, and just the right amount of scary for me (not overly).

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires starts off with a group of stereotypical 80s housewives starting a book club. And the second those ladies made it a true crime book club, I was all in. If you’re a fan of the blog you know I am obsessed with true crime, so it comes as no surprise that this aspect of the book endeared it to me. Not to mention the fact that I happened to read The Stranger Beside Me a few months ago and it is heavily discussed in this novel.

I loved how the women’s interest in true crime came into play in multiple areas of the story, as well. One, with how people, specifically men, perceived their worries and fears. And two, in how they used the fact that Ann Rule knew that all signs pointed to Ted Bundy and still didn’t realize it was him to understand their own situation. So, I appreciated that the elements of their book club played more of a role in the narrative than just the thing that brought them together as a group, though it did that too.

Going back to how men perceived the women’s thoughts in this story, it was deeply frustrating. I think any woman reading this novel would feel the same way since we’ve all experienced similar conversations before. The gaslighting, misogynistic tones of almost all the men in the novel are extreme but are also not unrealistic. There were numerous times throughout The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires that I rolled my eyes and had to take a deep breath because of how horrible the women were treated. But it added more depth to the novel and another layer of horror.

On that note, I loved that the novel dealt with the obvious horror elements of vampires but added in these more subtle, everyday horrors as well. It rooted the novel in the real world more than if it was just a book about vampires. Because I can be scared of a vampire, but I know they aren’t real. Whereas, the other difficult topics (trigger warnings needed for this book) such as, domestic violence, racism, gentrification, child assault, suicide, sexual assault and misogyny are all too real. Again, all these elements gave so much more depth to the story that I wasn’t expecting from a horror novel, and made me all the more compassionate and empathetic towards the female characters.

Speaking of the characters, I found them all fleshed out and interesting. While the female main characters were stereotypical in many ways, they also had characteristics that showed their unique personalities and flaws. And they were pretty obviously meant to be stereotypical housewives to emphasize all the unappreciated work that stay at home moms do. The male main character, James Harris, had a definite Gatsby vibe to him. A young man with a mysterious backstory comes to town with lots of money that no one really knows how he got. And I think that was an intentional allusion to Fitzgerald and the concept of the Great American Novel as this novel is so deeply rooted in American (especially Southern American) ideals.

Moving on, the novel was a fast read. I couldn’t put it down and needed to keep going to find out what happened next. Other than the rat scene, I didn’t want to keep going then except to get to the end of it. That being said, it still felt like the novel could be shorter as there were quite a few filler scenes and it did get a bit repetitive at times. My other issue was with the racism by a main character we’re supposed to root for and some white saviour complex vibes in the middle. These would be bigger issues for me, but both things were addressed and called out in the novel and were intended to show characteristics of the time the novel was set in.

Beyond that, I don’t have any glaring issues with this novel. I just also don’t have any huge praise for things that stuck out to me as making the novel great. It was fun, good for the season, and had some extra depth I didn’t expect, but it wasn’t mind-bogglingly amazing. So all in all, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires was a good scary story. It’s definitely not the scariest story I’ve ever read, but I’m a chicken so I don’t mind. I liked the interplay of typical monster horror with real life horrors. And I loved the cast of strong female characters sticking up for themselves against misogyny (and vampires). So, I would definitely recommend this book if you’re interested in horror novels or just want a quick and exciting read. And I’d also recommend this month’s cocktail if you don’t mind a little extra sweetness.

My Rating:

Thanks for reading! And, if you read the book or try the cocktail let me know in a comment or on Instagram. Also, if you haven’t yet read my previous reviews, I recommend reading How to Sell a Haunted House and Bright Young Women if you liked this one!

Teghann

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