Dracula Versus the Stepford Wives: A Review of Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires

I’ve been dying to talk about this book since reading the ARC in October. It drove me crazy  not being able to tell everyone I knew how good it is. The release date was April 7, so without further ado, here is my review of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires.

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (2020)
Written by: Grady Hendrix
Genre: Horror
Pages: 408
Publisher: Quirk Books

The Premise:

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.

Little by little, James will insinuate himself into Patricia’s life and try to take everything she took for granted — including the book club — but she won’t surrender without a fight in this blood-soaked tale of neighborly kindness gone wrong.

Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk.

Discussion: Back in October, I attended the Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival in Haverhill, Massachusetts. It’s a really great event founded by Christopher Golden, featuring some amazing Indie publishing houses and authors, as well as New York Times Best Selling authors like Kelley Armstrong, who wrote the Otherworld Series that began with one of my favorite novels, Bitten (2001), which has a female werewolf protagonist. While I was there, I had the pleasure of being on a panel moderated by Brian Keene, and I had a chat with Bram Stoker Award Winning Author, Grady Hendrix. I had enjoyed several of Grady’s panel discussions and his presentation of Paperbacks from Hell (2017), but until then, I had never had a chance to talk to him.

The conversation began like most conversations at a book signing with greetings, pleasantries, and small talk. I wanted to get a copy of Paperbacks from Hell for my mom for Christmas, and I thought a signed copy would be even better. While we were chatting, Grady asked me about my book and I explained that Invisible Chains (2019) is a supernatural slave narrative with a vampire antagonist. That grabbed his attention. He said something like, “Oh, so you like vampires.” I confirmed that I do in fact LOVE vampires, and he started telling me about his new book, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, and I got really excited. We talked about the evolution of vampires in the horror genre and how their stories have been used to talk about identity politics. Which then led to him asking me if I’d be willing to read an ARC of the book. I somehow managed not to squeal like a teenage fangirl, and said yes.

He was concerned about his depictions of race and gender in the novel and wanted honest feedback. Because the novel mainly centers around a group of women, including a woman of color, he wanted to portray them authentically without being offensive. I believe he accomplished that goal. And, he wrote a scary and unique book about a vampire-like creature that managed to creep me out and literally make me shiver.

Most of you are familiar with Bram Stoker’s legendary novel, Dracula (1897), in which an Eastern European nobleman, who happens to be a vampire, travels to Britain and attempts to establish a life there while preying on/courting upper-class English women. If you haven’t read the epistolary novel, I’m sure you’ve seen at least one of the many filmed versions. Over time, Count Dracula has evolved from being symbolic of unwanted foreign invasion to a symbol for the darker side of sexuality, especially for proper English ladies. He is simultaneously repulsive and attractive, blurring the lines between appropriate sexual conduct, as dictated by heteronormative patriarchal culture, and taboo fetishism.

However, you might not be as familiar with Ira Levin’s satirical, and super creepy novel, The Stepford Wives (1972), in which Levin challenges 19th and 20th century ideals of womanhood within the Cult of Domesticity, which demands that women within the heteronormative patriarchal culture adhere to four cardinal virtues: Piety, Purity, Submission, and Domesticity. Dracula was published on the cusp of first-wave feminism and the Suffragette movement, while The Stepford Wives was published during the second-wave of feminism beginning in the 1960s and lasting roughly through the beginning of the 1980s.

Hendrix’s novel opens in November 1988, which is the cusp of third-wave feminism that began in the 1990s. This is relevant because the novel focuses on a group of upper-middle class white housewives living in the suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina. At first glance, they seem happy with their lives and content to raise their children, cook and clean, and make themselves sexually available to their husbands. In the Prologue, we are told that, “This story begins with five little girls, each born in a splash of her mother’s blood, cleaned up, patted dry, then turned into proper young ladies, instructed in the wifely arts to become perfect partners and responsible parents, mothers who help with homework and do the laundry, who belong to church flower societies and bunco clubs, who send their children to cotillion and private schools” (pg 7).

We get a glimpse inside the private domestic lives of each of these characters — Patricia Campbell, Grace Cavanaugh, Kitty Scruggs,  Maryellen Whatever-Her-Name-Was, and Slick Paley — but the narrative is primarily told from the POV of the protagonist, Patricia, mother of two teenagers, Korey and Blue, and wife of successful psychiatrist, Carter Campbell. Aside from the occasional cocktail party or barbecue at one of her neighbor’s houses, Patricia’s primary social outlet is her book club, The Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant, which meets monthly at Marjorie Fretwell’s house. Bored with the literary picks on Marjorie’s list, a second book club forms, and Patricia, Grace, Kitty, Maryellen, and Slick form a closer bond while reading true crime and horror novels.

The story lines of these novels become a little too real for Patricia when a stranger moves into the neighborhood under suspicious circumstances. James Harris is a handsome charismatic man with the manners of someone much older than his 40-something appearance. He arrives in Patricia’s neighborhood under the cover of night and doesn’t make his presence known right away. Claiming to be Ann’s nephew, his arrival coincides with an unusual incident, in which Patricia’s elderly neighbor, Ann Savage, attacks her in the backyard and bites off her earlobe. Patricia defends herself, calls 911, and then Ann ends up in the hospital where she later dies.

Carter’s elderly mother, Miss Mary, who lives with Patricia’s family and requires a caregiver, Ursula Greene, becomes unusually agitated after the incident with Ann Savage, and keeps saying that Hoyt Pickens visited her that same night. No one knows who Hoyt Pickens is, but Miss Mary claims she has a picture of him. Assuming that she is having an episode brought on by her dementia, everyone chooses to ignore  her.

Feeling guilty for some absurd reason, Patricia makes a casserole, and takes it to Ann’s nephew. When she arrives, no one answers the door, so she goes inside without being invited. Inside, the house is dark even though it’s the middle of the day, and she finds Ann’s nephew lying on a bed and believes him to be dead. Like Dracula, his appearance is very different at first glance. Patricia’s assessment that he is dead isn’t that far fetched. Aside from the fact that he isn’t breathing, “he appeared starved. The flesh clung tight to his bones. The sallow skin of his face looked drawn and finely wrinkled, his blond hair looked brittle and thin” (pg 64). When she attempts to give the man CPR, he is startled awake, sits up, and scares Patricia so badly that she drops the casserole after being knocked backwards and slamming into a wall. She tries to apologize and clean up the mess, but he tells her she has to leave.

That night, he shows up at her house with her casserole dish and apologizes for his rude behavior that afternoon. Patricia finds it hard to believe that the man at her door is the same man she saw before. “He was still pale, but his skin looked soft and unlined. His hair was parted on the left and looked thick and full. He wore a khaki work shirt tucked into new blue jeans, the sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, exposing thick forearms” (pg 71). They exchange pleasantries, but Patricia is nervous while talking to the handsome stranger, which may be because he speaks to her like they are already acquainted, or because she feels guilty for finding him attractive.

The Old Village is the kind of neighborhood in which people leave their doors unlocked, kids can play outside without parental supervision, and neighbors feel comfortable walking into each other’s houses to drop things off or even borrow things while the owner is away from home. This magical fairy land of white suburbia where everyone feels safe and can trust each other without question due to their shared white privilege, is the perfect setting for a monster with the face of a handsome white man to prey upon unsuspecting housewives and their families.

Which, is exactly what James Harris does. And he does it in plain sight. He uses his white privilege, attractiveness, influence and wealth to win over the husbands of all Patricia’s friends. The men of the Old Village are making money and living their best lives, and willing to do anything to maintain their lifestyles, including betray their wives.

When Patricia begins to suspect that James Harris isn’t what he seems, she tries to convince her friends and then their husbands, including her own, that he is dangerous and they need to protect themselves against him. Instead of listening to his wife and supporting her, Carter bands together with the other husbands and James Harris to put them all in their place. Patricia’s continued insistence that James is some kind of monster earns her a stay in the mental hospital and drugs prescribed by her husband to make her more docile. Patricia’s friends accept defeat and return to their domestic duties like good little wives.

James Harris is a smart monster, and primarily preys on children from the black community outside of town, where Ursula Greene lives. Because missing black children aren’t a priority for police investigations, many children go missing and die over the course of several years and no one does anything about it. At least, not until Patricia and Ursula join forces and try to put a stop to the child murders.

Patricia seems to be the only person in her neighborhood who can see James Harris for what he truly is: a monster. She risks everything, including her life to keep the people she loves safe. Patricia Campbell is a feminist hero who rejects the Cult of Domesticity and disobediently sets out to battle the patriarchal monster who feels entitled to literally suck the life out of the black community, while using sexual assault and the threat of violence to control the white women in his own neighborhood. He is the embodiment of everything terrible about white masculinity, and he is a terrifying monster.

In Conclusion: Hendrix has created a time capsule of gender and race relations in the late ’80s that depicts the threat of white masculinity as a literal monster. A monster that still threatens the safety of marginalized communities, women, and non-heteronormative people of all classes, ethnicities and genders. James Harris is charming, handsome, rich and white, and his sense of entitlement is the stuff of nightmares.

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is an excellent horror novel that will scare you, give you the creeps, make you laugh, make you angry, and make you a little more cautious of the people who live in your neighborhood.