The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix is a mostly enjoyable book that has all the best elements of structure and works, for the most part. It has earned its high grades: almost 40,000 reviews on Goodreads with an average rating of 4.0 is amazing. Given that only about 10% of readers ever leaves a review, that computes to about 400,000 copies sold, but I think the actual number is much more.

Despite its success, and despite my own admiration for it (I fall into the five-star category of Goodreads reviewers), it isn’t perfect, and how good it is makes its flaws stand out all the more. Its flaws are small in terms of word count but actually have large ramifications on how the text is read, and that’s interesting. Like that’s interesting to dissect. As someone who teaches writing, it’s really interesting to dissect things that are done perfectly (like, say, The Shawshank Redemption) and it’s hard to dissect things that fail completely, but Hendrix falls into a really fun category of something that is almost perfect and can be used to highlight what a specific type of flaw can do to a book.

So, let’s talk about this.

First, let’s get some general review and good points out of the way.

Summary: Patricia Campbell is our main character, and in an afterword Hendrix says he based her on powerful Southern women like his mother. That’s going to be weird in a minute, but let’s put a pin in that for now. She leads a normal life for the time and place she’s in, has children, a husband who spends a lot of time out of the house, a book club with friends. Then a stranger moves into town, a man named James Harris. He begins indoctrinating himself into the group, the women, the men, the whole community, but he harbors a dark secret: he’s a vampire, and he’s praying on black and brown women in the community, people who “won’t be noticed.” And sure enough, nobody believes Patricia when she tells them: not the women in her book club, not the men, and not the police.

Eventually, Patricia becomes so desperate at seeing this evil infiltrate her world that she attempts to end her life (more on this in a minute) by ingesting poison. She fails and is cared for, but some time later the women begin to notice that they and their daughters are being prayed on as well. They see too late that Patricia was right, but the men and the police still do not believe. They take it upon themselves to slay the vampire James Harris, and Patricia does so by offering herself to him in such a way that he is vulnerable to the slaying by the women of the Southern Book Club.

The Good. This book reads to me as a representation of the Pastor Martin Niemöller poem “First They Came,” which has been on my mind a lot lately. The vampire comes for the weakest in the society first, the ones who are vulnerable, and once enough of them are gone, then they start coming for the group that ignored them and said “that’s not my problem.” That’s really interesting. Especially because of the Southern setting, which Hendrix takes full advantage of. This book reads like a damning – and sometimes harsh – condemnation about the dangers of white supremacy, and the way this “old foe” who “never died” from the World War II Germany era comes back and starts infesting his ideology into the young men like Patricia’s son and eventually even her husband in chilling. Make no mistake, Hendrix knows what he’s doing here: let’s take the most famous German film from the era, Nosferatu, and pin it to fascistic beliefs of that time and place like white supremacy. This book is basically: “what if Count Orlok was a Nazi?” and on that level, woo-boy, this works. It is chilling.

This old threat from WW2 comes back and infests the minds of our youth and clueless men while praying on women and minorities? This book reads like if the evil that drives the Nazis and the Alt-Right were represented by a universal monster. It works on that level, and at times feels genuinely prophetic. Hendrix is drawing on the problems of the real world and using the metaphor of the horror genre to tell it in a way that is genuinely literary.

And like, on a personal level, as someone who sees himself as a capital-P Progressive, I really sympathize with Patricia. She reads like she’s the first person in this town to “wake up” (get woken up… if only there were a term for that…) to the injustice facing the underprivileged in her community. She sees that these young black women are being hurt and tries to ring the alarm bells, but everyone who doesn’t see it can’t see it, and don’t see it until they’re victimized too, and by that point Harris has amassed enough of a hold that it is too late. Patricia is like Cassandra, doomed to see what’s coming but have no one believe her. And god damn, if that doesn’t feel true sometimes. Fuck me. Some days I feel like screaming from the rooftops like she does, and sometimes, on dark days, it feels like there’s no hope, as she must have felt when she tried to take her own life (more on that soon, I swear).

Hendrix also does some really interesting and disturbing things to vampire lore. Vampires have often been seen as sexual beings, the biting of the neck reminiscent of kissing the neck. Egger’s Nosferatu really links the Vampire with sexual desire. Hendrix goes a step further and twists the vampire lore so that James Harris has to suck blood from the femoral artery of his victims. For those who don’t know biology, right in the inside of the leg, up where it meets the pelvis. And he describes it as coming with this intense slurping sound, and he doesn’t bite: a phallic protrusion comes out of his mouth and attaches. In case it’s not clear what I’m saying here, Hendrix makes the method in which Harris sucks the blood of his victims more akin to performing oral sex on them, and its stated that this has a euphoric effect on the victims so that they continue to allow it to happen.

And here Hendrix brings in another strong element to the horror of this piece, the horror of not being able to protect our children. Patricia walks in on Harris performing this act on her young daughter, and it’s presented as being as though a stranger came into their home, gained their trust, and began taking sexual advantage of their child… which, is true. That is what happened. It’s just using vampire to tell it.

So Harris has managed to seamlessly blend in this monster a mix of the alt-right, racism, serial killers, racism, and sexual predation. And it works, god damn, James Harris is a smooth talking embodiment of everything wrong in the world, and you buy him, and you buy why all the men go along with him hook line and sinker. The men and the police are on his side, and it’s up to the women to stop him. Women who read, specifically. That’s pretty blatant when you lay it out like that, and I love it.

So, what’s the problem?

So I’ve alluded to two things twice before now, that at the “low point” of the novel Patricia attempts to end her own life, and that in  the end Patricia sacrifices herself that this is a (likely intentional) callback to classic vampire works like Dracula and Nosferatu. Robert Egger’s Nosferatu from this past year ended in much the same way, so there’s almost a built-in defense of this climax.

I’ve mentioned it twice in the “good” part of this review to really highlight the tool that Hendrix does not use well: Setup, Remind, Payoff or Rule of Threes.

In an economical plot, in a manuscript where the only things present are the things that need to be present, everything should be a Setup, a Remind, or a Payoff. This is sometimes called Chekov’s Gun: if you want a gun to go off in the third act, you need to set it up in the first act. And if you set something up in the first act, you had better have used it by the end of the final one.

In the novel, Patricia attempts suicide by poisoning herself. She is described as needed blood to get it out of her system. Then in the end, in order to make a deal with James Harris to save her daughter, Patricia offers herself to him in an allusion to Ellen Hutter offering herself to Orlok in Nosferatu. And you, being a very smart reader, think to yourself: “aha, I know what she’s done. She’s poisoned herself again with that same drug she tried to kill herself with before! When James Harris drinks from her, he’ll take the drug and be weakened. It may even kill him!”

Because that would be a Payoff to what has been Set Up.

And that… does not happen. While Harris is performing his act on Patricia, the other women of the book club storm in and beat him over the head, and he dies. Thus ends the tale.

And if that seems anti-climactic… it’s because it is. Because they way you Build to a Climax is via Setup, Remind, and Payoff. And the poison wasn’t a Red Herring, for that to be the case it’d still come paid off in another way. It really seems like it was set up and forgotten.

That bothers me. Which leads to a Freudian Review, where you take what bothered you about a book and extrapolate out: and the book doesn’t fare well under such a review. Those who dislike this book often call it sexist, that’s it is a female-centric book from the malest of male points-of-view, and I think that review stems from this problem. When you don’t pay off the poison to make it so that Patricia is tricking Harris… then she’s literally just baiting him with sex. She’s not outsmarting him, outmaneuvering him, outwitting him at his own game. She gets him into a vulnerable position using sex and takes it as an opportunity for a physical attack.

And that problem at the core of the narrative, that failure to pay off the poison, in our world we can blame that on Hendrix. We can say that he, nor his editors, nor his publishers, caught that they “set something up” then did not “pay it off,” creating a plot hole. But in the world of the book, that means Patricia wasn’t smart enough to see that option that I imagine every reader thought was what she was going to do. As a result the book inadvertently implies that women like Patricia aren’t smart enough to defeat the evils of the world with the tools available to them, that all they can do is use their sexuality.

And I do think that was accidental. I do think that was inadvertent. I don’t think Hendrix would have said he based Patricia off his own mother if he thought she could only solve problems through sex… at least, I hope not, because WOW there’d be a lot to unpack there. That would take the term Freudian Review to a whole new level. No, I think this reading (while very valid, and I totally understand the criticism) is a consequence of nobody catching this Setup-Remind-Payoff failure, and the unraveling of the narrative as a result.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Hendrix did intend that message, and maybe his editors and publish saw it and instead of changing it, he threw in a line about Patricia being based on his mother to try and ward off criticism. I don’t think that’s the case, but it might be.

This is the danger than having “loose threads” in your book can have. It doesn’t always happen, but it can. One loose thread can unravel the tapestry of your entire work.

Because let’s not stop, let’s dive deeper down this rabbit hole. Because of this Setup-Payoff Failure, you’ve inadvertently implied that the only tool at a woman’s disposal to thwart evil is their sexuality. Okay, it’s one thing to say that in Nosferatu when the themes and metaphors of the remainder of the text back that up and support it… but what happens when you change the metaphor but keep the resolution?

What happens when you link your monster character not to sexual needs and societal constraints, but to the Alt-Right, to Nazism, to fascism and racism and the crimes against the underprivileged? Because when you mix those metaphors with that conclusion without forethought… you kind of end up implying that all these horrible problems of the world would be resolved if women just put out more. That all the murder done against black and brown people, all of the ways in which the evils of the world seek to corrupt the minds of our sons and the bodies of our daughters, all of that would be solved if women would just… yeah.

And before you say to me, that’s ridiculous: that is an argument that a frighteningly not-small group of people make. That so many of the worst in our society right now are angry incels who are lashing out at a world where they couldn’t get what they were promised. That society used to be structured such that men could achieve women without the women’s consent: by asking their fathers, or by lording societal constraints over them (women could not get bank accounts without men until 1964 in Canada, where I write this from). There are people who argue, disgustingly, that if women would just take one for the team and fuck these unfuckable men, that they would stop being so angry. That the rise of fascism, racism, and hatred can be traced back to more and more women not giving themselves over to angry men who would fall prey to it. That is an argument I have heard, in as many words, on network television.

Is Grady Hendrix saying that we could stop the Nazi’s if white women would just put out more? I don’t know, I can’t see inside his head. But his book sure is saying that.

If I’m being asked to make a judgment call, I’m going to say: No. I don’t think Hendrix was trying to say that. I fucking hope not, anyway. I think what happened here was that he had the ending as an allusion to Nosferatu in his head from early on in the writing process, and ignored when the narrative bent away from that ending.

But now the book is the book, and that simple failure of Setup –Remind – Pay off, one of the book’s only structural failures, leaves it open to all this valid criticism.

In the end, I still give this book five stars. I understand the point of view of the detractors, and I think their points are valid. I think this is a flawed book, and that an unintentional flaw in Hendrix’s writing made the book flawed in that way. I’m not “discounting” the flaw when I give it five stars, but rather saying, any book that allows for this much discussion on these important subject deserves to be read and discussed and thought about, even if it might err on the wrong side of things.