The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires
By: Grady Hendrix / Narrated By: Bahni Turpin
Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins
Jiminy H. Freaking Crickets! I was expecting humor, sleuthing, some blood and whimsy! NOPE! Straight horror and characters who are weak until they absolutely HAD to do something.
I kinda sorta read the Publisher’s Summary with this one, but mostly I picked it based on the title: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. Sounds fun, doesn’t it? Kinda brings to mind ladies donning long white gardening gloves before going off to kick some righteous A** ! Like they take time off from their genteel book club chatter, from sipping Mimosas, deduce threats, then haul off to stalk Blood Sucking Villains, all whilst wearing non-running stockings and sensible low-heeled pumps.
Whoooooo BOY! Not by aaaany stretch of the imagination. I was so hoping I’d found a cozy vampire-killing story, complete with smart and willing-to-take-courage women, as a possible: Here’s something that can follow up listening to Vivian Shaw’s Dr. Greta Helsing audiobooks for a new Accomplice. Good sleuthing with that vampiric twist.
And I’m not going to say the whoo-boy again, but…
The book starts off very promisingly enough. Patricia, wife to a busy and uninvolved man, mother to two increasingly distant kids, is part of a posh book club… and it’s her turn to lead the group… but she tried getting past the book’s first sentence… several times… and good gosh no… didn’t make it. Her humiliation in front of the poshest woman there sends her running, but others in the group were feeling bored and disaffected too. A new book club is born: One which thrives on True Crime! Blood! Guts! Horror! And cheap thrills that they all refuse to feel guilty about.
So huzzah! And then Patricia is attacked by an old and crazed woman, her ear lobe is bitten off, the woman’s sole remaining family, James, comes into the lives of Patricia and the rest, and ominous things start happening to children on the poor side of town.
And thus it all goes downhill with our characters. Cuz see, they’re mostly rich and entitled, and they really don’t care that poor black kids are being found dead, are going missing, are talking about a scary white man beckoning to them. Patricia does, sorta, make the connection between this scary white man and the sudden appearance of James in the entitled community. But when her husband takes her to task for offending the dude, who’s white, and points out that it’s just a plain old bummer that the kids being terrorized are black; and when all the other husbands of the book club browbeat their wives into submission, all is put to rest. For three years.
But it starts with Patricia’s suicide attempt. And her son will never forgive her (He’s the one who found her seizing on the floor). And there’s Patricia’s husband medicating her into a stupor… for those three years. And there are instances of physical violence done to the other women. And they all pull back and their friendships become shallow and filled with superficial conversation. And all of their rich entitled children go off the rails in hateful ways. And the book club families reap great monetary rewards from their affiliation with James (So of COURSE they won’t do anything, for three years, cuz it’s only black kids who are still turning up dead).
Seriously, I was getting so beaten across the head and neck with depression, ambivalence, avarice, women staying with husbands who were total jerks and who treated them as just so much dirt to keep under their shoes. Patricia doesn’t act again until she receives a communication via a dream, and then she goes about it in a hysteria-ridden fashion; the other women are NOT willing accomplices but are rather hostile and cut her out. They betray each other, and it’s only when they think that their own (rich, entitled) children are in jeopardy that they come to act and oh SOOO belatedly join forces at the very very end of the book.
Nope. No good and staunch heroines. No decent men. The kids were obnoxious. Plenty of blood and gore at the end, but no whimsy in taking care of evil. And the oooonly humor I found in the book was when Patricia comforts the very ill friend, Slick (Who turns heroine…. AFTER being a betraying jerk), by reading In Cold Blood to her.
Bahni Turpin! Gosh I LOVE her! She narrates her head off in this one with fraught circumstance after fraught circumstance, with characters who alternate between sneering contempt and utter rage. When Patricia’s unhinged jerk of a son loses his marbles, Turpin shrieks it fearlessly, making me loathe the danged kid even more than I would’ve… perhaps… dunno… his preoccupation with Nazis kinda sealed his fate with me early on then, when you add an instance of “youthful hijinks” animal abuse thrown in there…? So Brava, to Ms. Turpin, but I truly wish that she had more sympathetic and courageous characters and less OVERly dramatic situations to work with.
Well, at least everybody was kind to a dying dog at the end. But other than that, everybody was a mean, self-absorbed, self-serving jerk otherwise.
But at least I’ve crossed this one off my list; now it’s off to, Heaven willing, find something DECENTLY whimsically bloodbath-ish for all good Accomplices to enjoy.
Wish me luck!
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