Review for The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires: Suburban Buffy Summers

There aren’t that many things that are certain in life. Birth for one. Death for two. My absolute and unequivocal hatred against horror for three. I do not like it and I have never liked it but for the very specific section of horror that deals with the mythical: enter Buffy the Vampire Slayer when I was twelve years old and watched all seven seasons on YouTube (back before copyright didn’t have such a chokehold on absolutely everything). So, as I was scrolling through bookstagram, as one does, I noticed a user share a particularly interesting photo of a book titled The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix that screamed to me with an incredible book cover and even more capturing title. In my mind, there was absolutely no way that this novel wasn’t going to be a hybrid crossover between Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Fried Green Tomatoes. I was a little let down when it became clear that it was more just realistic horror with a twist of the supernatural, but the book was doubtless a captivating and exciting read, nonetheless.

The novel, as Hendrix points out before the story begins, is essentially a love letter to the suburban mothers of the 80s and 90s who were often overlooked but did everything for everyone else. The story begins with a young mother of two, Patricia Campbell, who fails to read the “worldly” novel of the month, which results in her accidental disbanding of the book club she’s in and the somewhat purposeful birth of a new book club. Thus forms the supermom girlboss group that I think Hendrix sells well, and the five mothers soon become inseparable friends who take care of each other when the worst things happen. Unfortunately, no one could’ve prepared the five of them for the arrival of one James Harris, a young (looking) man who captures Patricia’s attention fully and spirals her, her family, her friends, and her community into a slow but steady downward slope.

There were definitely some high points of this novel. I think that Hendrix crafted his villain extremely well and paralleled him expertly to an archetypical gaslighting abuser so that his femme audience would feel just as angry at him as the mothers who eventually work against him. And for a straight cis man, he wrote the white women pretty accurately, I would say. Everything from the speech to the little mannerisms like shoulders slumping at the children not fulfilling their chores felt genuine, and for the first hundred pages or so, I was hooked. Further, I think that Hendrix definitely belongs in the genre he writes for. As I wrote earlier, I have an intense aversion to horror. I normally can’t stand it, but Hendrix has an amazing ability to grasp his audience’s attention and force them to keep reading. I don’t have much suspense novel experience to base an opinion against, but I think it’s safe to say that there is some incredible work happening in this novel for that genre. It felt gross, so much so that rats and cockroaches, which never used to bother me that much before, now make me more uncomfy than I’d like. But I think that was the point and Hendrix does a great job at the basics of the genre.

However, I’ve been seeing a few Black and Indigenous creators across all social media platforms (like @k4fi4 and @deanmodah on TikTok) discuss how it’s clear that any white person, no matter their gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, able-bodied status, or mental health, is always white before anything else. Every marginalization and experience that a white person faces will always be informed by their whiteness, and it’s abundantly clear that a white person is the author of this novel based off the way he wrote the character of Ursula Greene and everyone in her community.

I did think it was smart for him to make James take his victims from a predominantly Black neighbourhood, considering the police genuinely would not and do not care about missing or murdered Black children. Further, he was right to note how all the white women in the novel would bow out of the investigation at one point when the choice was between their families and a Black community, and then further emphasize the fact that they have a choice. What I really don’t like about this novel is how passive Ursula is throughout until she is needed to either inform or protect the white women’s characters. The white savior complex, as much as Hendrix tries to fluff it with some basic knowledge about how white husbands gaslight and abuse their wives and how police don’t take women seriously, is abundant and clear for anyone who has either seen it before or is critically paying attention to the plot.

In every novel I’ve read by Black authors and every film I’ve seen from Black screenwriters, and especially Black women writers, there’s been absolutely no way that the Black woman protagonist hasn’t taken charge of her own life to protect her family and community. The fact that Hendrix not only makes Ursula beg for help from white women but also pits them against each other at one point just made me incredibly upset and turned me off the novel. As if Ursula wouldn’t have her own friends to take on and dispose of James. The ending also made such little sense to me and once again focuses solely on the white women and only gives a few lines towards Ursula, who is much more integral to the plot than even Hendrix gives credit for. And I think the fact that he prefaces the novel with a note about the subject matter and characters almost makes it seem like an apology for the way he treats every other character in the story. It's all just a little too fishy for me!

Overall, I gave this novel a 3.5-star rating on Goodreads because Hendrix is clearly a talented writer, and it would’ve been five stars if he didn’t so royally mess up his representations of Black women and the Black community more broadly. So, if you’re into horror, I’d say give this book a read, but just try and look out for what I’m saying about it and think critically about how it could’ve been done better.