Literature / The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

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The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires is a 2020 horror novel by Grady Hendrix, pitched as Steel Magnolias meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The book takes place in The '90s and follows Patricia, a doctor's wife and dissatisfied stay-at-home mom in Charleston, South Carolina. She and a few of her neighbors grow bored of the existing book club in town which focuses exclusively on high-brow literature and form a new one focussed on True Crime content. Later, she is attacked one night by the old woman who lives down the street and gets her ear lobe bitten off.

The attack followed the appearance of James, a charismatic young man who claims to be a relative of said neighbor. He quickly earns the favor of many people in town, but Patricia starts to lose trust in him. He has quite a sum of money, but it's all in cash, and rarely goes out in the daytime. At the same time, mysterious disappearances and suicides start plaguing the town's poorer neighborhoods. From there, she begins to suspect that he is a vampire, and she enlists her book club of other Charleston moms to help her.

Contains examples of:

• Aerith and Bob: Like My Best Friend's Exorcism, there are "normal" names like Patricia, Kitty, Bobby, Grace, and James — but there is also a Slick (one of Patricia's book club friends) and Kitty's husband is called Horse.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: When James realizes that the Book Club really is going to dismember him, he starts trying to get them to let him go by arguing that his existence is a miracle and offering them the secret to his immortality. They don't listen to him.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: An In-Universe example with Maryellen's take on The Bridges of Madison County, where she sees Robert Kincaid as a cunning predator rather than a romantic lead.
• And I Must Scream: Even after decapitating, dismembering, disemboweling James, and driving nails through his eyes, he still is producing blood. He's still alive, and will likely be stuck like that until he's gone a year without drinking blood.
• Bittersweet Ending: Slick died after being raped, Six Mile was destroyed by James' Villainous Gentrification scheme, many families in the Old Village (including all of the Book Club families) went broke due to the real estate collapse, and James is still alive... kind of. However, on the bright side, he's trapped in an And I Must Scream situation where he can't reach any more children, the book club are keeping a watchful eye on his remains, Korey and Blue recuperate from James grooming them, Patricia gets a divorce and has the resources to live on her own between her personal bank account and her nursing degree, and when Carter tries to manipulate Blue and Korey again to hurt Patricia, they in fact turn on him and tell them they want to live with Patricia.
• Blood Bath: Played with. James is a vampire, but his actual blood bath comes up when the book club, and Mrs Green, get him into the bathtub and chop him up, meaning that he doesn't get into it or choose to soak into it, but he ends up there through circumstances.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: Korey. She is constantly rude to Patricia and refers to Patricia as stupid even before James enters the neighborhood. It gets worse after James starts grooming her.
• Breaking and Bloodsucking: Played With James does this to Patricia's daughter Korey. He claims she "offered herself" to him but given his manipulative nature this should be taken with a grain of salt.
• Buried Alive: Miss Mary recounts the Cruel and Unusual Death of a black man from her youth named Leon Simms, who wrongfully suffered this fate at the hands of a lynch mob after Hoyt Pickens convinced the townsfolk that Leon was behind the disappearances of several children. And they buried him in her family's yard, no less.
  Patricia realized that was why Miss Mary let the peaches rot. The memory of the fruit's sweet juice running down her chin, its meat filling her stomach, now tasted sour with Leon Simms's blood.
• Business Trip Adultery: Patricia not only notices that Carter spends a lot of time away from home, either at the hospital or off on some business-related ventures, but that he's gotten more than a few suspect phone calls from strange women he passes off as colleagues. James breaks it to her near the end that both Leland, Slick's husband, and Carter have indeed been sleeping with untold numbers of other women during their trips out of town, but she later admits that she knew all along about Carter's infidelity and had only been lying to herself for her own sake until that point.
• Cassandra Truth: Zig-zagged. When Patricia first sees James in his van feeding off of Destiny, she tells the police what she saw. But the result is less than stellar and Destiny's injuries are attributed to a boyfriend her mother must have even though she's single. Patricia later puts the pieces together that James is a vampire and wants to get her book club on board in investigating so they can find something incriminating. But, being savvy of this trope, she invents a story to tell them about him giving/selling drugs to children instead of feeding on them since this is much more plausible and fits the evidence she has. Initially even this idea seems too much for them to believe and it seems like the trope will play out again, but eventually they all come around to it and agree to help her find more evidence so the police will look into him. The trope gets played straight again once the husbands catch wind and refuse to believe anything the women tell them.
• Child Eater: James Harris feeds off children by using a tentacle appendage to drain their blood. Harris requires this to rejuvenate himself and cares nothing about what it does to his victims, who are driven to kill themselves due to the effects it has on their minds. It's implied near the end of the book that Harris doesn't need to feed off children exclusively to survive, he just likes doing it because he's a sadist.
• Convenient Photograph: The Alzheimer's-ridden Mary tells Patricia that there was a man in a white suit in Kershaw, South Carolina in the 1920s who convinced the townspeople to lynch a black man for killing a host of kids. Patricia manages to find a photograph of him in Mary's belongings that confirms this is James.
• Convenience Store Gift Shopping: It's mentioned that Carter always buys Patricia's birthday presents at the drugstore, to the point that she's thrilled when he finally surprises her with a lovely gift: a pair of expensive-looking pearl earrings. After one of her new earrings is bitten off and swallowed by Mrs. Savage, though, Carter admits that they had been nothing more costume jewelry given to him for free by one of his clients. And to rub salt in the wounds, he offers to just get Patricia something else from the pharmacy to make up for it.
• Devil in Plain Sight: James is one of these as Patricia becomes more and more aware of this; it's suggested, in fact, that he used the boundaries of polite society to achieve this, rather than his actual vampiric powers.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • James's blood-draining of young kids (including Patricia's daughter Korey) is full of thinly veiled references to sexual abuse. He even literally sucks from their inner thigh on top of grooming his victims (usually from poor, deprived areas).
  • James' feeding/blood filtration process causes immense pleasure in his victims, is implied to be addictive for them, and involves a foreign substance in their bloodstream introduced through puncture wounds in their thighs. It's no wonder Patricia characterizes him as a drug pusher when trying to convince the others he's a predator.
  • The Gracious Cay development that James sponsors in the Six Mile neighborhood is a case of Villainous Gentrification as plain as day, once again exploiting poor people who society won't miss.
• Domestic Abuse: All of the women have to deal with some share of this. Patricia's husband basically puts her in a psychiatric ward when her dire situation has her Driven to Suicide and lets her children see her in such condition. Grace's husband beats her and destroys her cherished China set after finding out about the Club's suspicions. Slick just gets yelled at and has her subservient position to her husband reinforced by him quoting the Bible.
• Driven to Suicide: James Harris feeds off children and the effect is devastating to their young minds over time, eventually causing them to kill themselves in violent ways.
• Dying as Yourself: At the end, a dying Slick demands that her body be cremated, as she knows that she's turning into a vampire and will rise from the grave after she dies.
• Ear Ache: One of her neighbors tears off and eats Patricia's ear lobe. Later a roach burrows in there.
• The End... Or Is It?: Patricia visits one of the graves for James's dismembered body parts and can still hear him scrabbling around.
• Eye Scream: James finally goes silent after Mrs. Greene drives nails through his eyes, before the club butchers him the rest of the way.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: James Harris is a handsome, charming seemingly young all-American man whose good looks and charisma hide the fact he's a sadistic vampire who savours killing.
• Fat, Sweaty Southerner in a White Suit: Mr. Harris is pretty fit, but he does not like the sun at all. Furthermore, once money starts flooding into the Old Village from the housing development, a lot of people start adopting this style which doesn't suit them.
• Faux Affably Evil: James Harris is a seemingly polite vampire who charms anyone who comes into contact with him. Harris uses this as a front, though, as he's really a savage, monstrous killer who enjoys hurting others.
• Foreshadowing: Miss Mary's story of what Hoyt Pickens did when she was a child predicts exactly what James Harris does in the present, from trying to frame an innocent black person (Mrs. Greene this time) for his crimes to bankrupting a good chunk of the Old Village with his property development scheme.
  • The whole book has a somewhat unique, ongoing type of foreshadowing. Each section of the novel is introduced with the month taking place and the title of the book the club is going to read. Anyone who's well read (especially in popular 80s and 90s era true crime) will get an idea of how things will go since the plot developments of each section parallel the book club selection to some degree.
• Generation Xerox: Subverted. James Harris isn't a descendant of Hoyt Pickens, as is claimed by skeptical people who see Miss Mary's photograph of him, he is Hoyt Pickens.
• Healing Factor: While the women are going about trying to dispatch him for good, James taunts them with the knowledge that he has the power to regenerate from his injuries if given enough time. Having a knife driven deep into his spine, and even being completely dismembered, both fail to kill him and will only immobilize him for so long, forcing the Book Club to spread his writhing body parts across several different bags and stuff them into two separate crypts to prevent him from rising again.
• History Repeats: Miss Mary recognizes James because, when she was a child, she saw James when he went by Hoyt Pickens. Hoyt got her father involved in a scheme to secretly brew booze during the Prohibition era, and it made them prosperous for a time. Hoyt then blamed the mysterious deaths of children in the area on an innocent black man, whom they murdered and then buried in Miss Mary's backyard. Two generations later, he returns to the area and gets away with killing children for years because he mostly focuses on children from low-income African American households. Miss Mary's son gets involved in his new moneymaking scheme, which involves forcing more poor African American families out of their homes, and when James vanishes again, Carter also is financially devastated by the event.
• Homage: Also crossing over with a Shout-Out (although it's not mentioned by name), James keeps one of his victims, his previous cleaner, wrapped in plastic and strung up in his attic, like the first death in Black Christmas (1974).
• Implied Rape: While James explicitly rapes Slick near the end of the novel, he prefers to bleed kids or young teenagers, which involves biting them on the inner thigh. It's never answered if he sexually abuses the children, though all three times he's seen feeding in the novel he seems to prefer both of them being totally naked.
• Infallible Babble: Miss Mary, Patricia's Alzheimer's-ridden mother-in-law, gives a lot of this. She correctly identifies James as "the man in the white suit", which is how Patricia figures out he's a vampire.
• Kiss of the Vampire: James' bite is described as feeling extremely pleasurable, to the point of addiction.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The Book Club finally deliver this to James at the end of the book after him getting away with murdering at least one person a year for literal centuries. At the same time, the husbands, all of whom took James's side and stopped their wives from bringing him to justice, are financially devastated by getting involved in his housing development.
• Life Drinker: On top of being a vampire, this is heavily implied to be part of James's MO, which is also why James' victims kill themselves, either because they are addicted and/or because so much of their life has been drained away.
• Mammy: Mrs. Greene is one, and it's one of the most polarizing elements of the story. Is she a deconstruction because she's supposed to show how out of touch the wealthy white women are from her deprived "ghetto" life, or is she actually a reconstruction because she still forgives them and shows the mammy's caring for upper-class white society along with her extreme competence?
• Missing White Woman Syndrome: James Harris mostly targets black children in the poor Six Mile neighborhood because he knows that the authorities won't care. He only goes after Korey and Blue because Patricia made it personal by trying to stop him.
• Not Dead, Just Asleep: Patricia drops by the house of her recently deceased neighbor to bring her nephew, who has just moved in, a casserole as a condolence. Instead, she finds James Harris lying unresponsive in bed, looking and feeling every bit like an old corpse, and she starts giving him CPR... which startles him awake. Yet when James visits her later that same evening, he suddenly looks young, handsome and healthy — one of the first hints to his true nature.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: Patricia's brothers-in-law and her husband were supposed to take turns watching the senile Miss Mary, but when Carter takes the first visit, they refuse to take her, meaning Patricia has to take care of her full time, and her senility makes her very rude and difficult to deal with. Later subverted with Miss Mary, who gives Patricia a warning from beyond the grave and watches over her after they finally defeat James.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Miss Mary returns as an apparition several times to thwart James, once to place evidence in Mrs. Green's hand for safe keeping and again to keep get Patricia out of her drug-fueled funk and to start acting again.
• Our Vampires Are Different: While there are supernatural elements in the book, James Harris comes across as more of a biological oddity. He has sensitive eyes, but they don't stop him going out into the daylight if he uses sunglasses. He feeds not with fangs, but with a proboscis hidden in his throat, and the process is pleasurable and addictive for his victim. (He claims that this lets him use another's body to "filter" his blood, but he is an Unreliable Narrator trying to give a cover-his-ass explanation after getting caught.) The conversion process requires sexual contact, which causes a medical condition compared to a autoimmune condition or AIDS, and the victim grows a proboscis of their own. Despite all this, he is still supernatural given that he's still alive after getting dismembered.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: James is evil and needs to be destroyed literal years prior to this, but the impetus for all the women to get together and agree to kill him is that he raped Slick and caused her death.
• Sealed Evil in a Six Pack: After dismembering James Harris, the women do this to him, splitting up the parts, dumping some in the ocean, and putting the rest in Grace's crypt.
• Shout-Out:
  • The books the women read include The Stranger Beside Me and they talk about Ted Bundy a lot.
  • They also read In Cold Blood, Helter Skelter, and, after James takes over and they get overrun by men, Tom Clancy (who Patricia hates).
• Southern Gothic Satan: James Harris is a corrupting presence in the Old Village, but all he does he does by taking advantage of longstanding issues there, particularly the authorities ignoring the black community, the husbands' misogyny and greed, and the community's obsession with keeping up appearances. He also shares his name with a Recurring Character from much of Shirley Jackson's horror fiction, who goes back all the way to "Ballad of the Deamon Lover".
• Spiritual Antithesis: In the foreword, Hendrix stated that he intended it as this to another of his novels, My Best Friend's Exorcism. Both are set in Charleston in relatively recent historical periods (the 1980s in the case of the latter, and the 1990s for this one), cover years, and show female friendship facing off against an otherworldly evil that is ultimately defeated through perseverance. However, while that book was written from a teenage point of view and presented the adults as useless, this book is told from the parents' point of view and is about them trying to protect their families.
• Stepford Suburbia: The entire neighborhood is one of these, full of smiles on the outside and spousal abuse behind closed doors.
• Swarm of Rats: The Campbell household is overrun by a horde of vicious rats while Mrs. Greene and Miss Mary are home alone on the night of Grace's party. At first, there's no explanation for it, but Patricia later realizes that the attack had to have been orchestrated by James after Miss Mary found the photograph of him as "Hoyt Pickens" in 1928.
• Take That!: To Tom Clancy, whose prose Patricia compares to that of an insurance salesman trying to sound like a military man.
• Vampires Are Rich: James has $85,000 in cash that he carries with him, and a key part of his MO is to get the locals involved in a financial scheme with promises of enormous wealth before taking their money and walking away.
• Villainous Gentrification: The Gracious Cay development that James sponsors, which sees much of the poor, black Six Mile neighborhood bulldozed to make way for it. James intends to use it to fleece its investors more than anyone else, taking their money and then sabotaging the project before moving on and leaving the Old Village broke.
• Weakened by the Light: James can barely venture out in the day and is visibly sickened when he does so.