The Horror Bound Book Club's Guide to Grady Hendrix
I have to admit upfront that I’m a huge fan of all of Grady Hendrix’s novels. The first of his that I read was My Best Friends Exorcism and I loved it, then went back and read Horrorstor. I got We Sold Our Souls a few weeks after it came out and devoured it, so I knew when The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires came out, it wouldn’t be long before I’d have read it and chances were I would like it. This book delivered everything thing I would expect from a Grady Hendrix novel.
As the title suggests, this book revolves around a book club. But it’s not just any book club, it’s a book club of women in an upper class southern town, who focus not on the pretentious books you would expect them to read but on gritty true crime books about murders and serial killers. I went through a phase when I was younger where I read nothing but true crime books. For a while, I couldn’t get enough of them and reading this book made me think about the true crime stuff that has come out that I haven’t read and made me reevaluate my current TBR list. I read a lot of books every year and I have a wall of book shelves full of books in my house so it’s rather unsurprising that a book about people reading books would be something I would enjoy. But this novel is so much more than that.
The story revolves around Patricia, a southern woman who get a little bored in her mundane life looking after her children and taking care of the house. The one part of her life she looks forward to is the meetings with her book club. As mentioned above, they love to get together to read true crime and other thriller-type books and discuss them. But when someone new moves into the neighborhood and his arrival coincides with strange deaths and disappearances Patrica connects the two as more than just coincidence. She takes her suspicions to her book club but initially they don’t believe her, assuming that all of the books they’ve read over the years have made her see evil in anyone she doesn’t know very well. But Patricia persists and finds this new neighbor to be a lot worse than she originally feared.
While I loved this book to no end, it was set up differently than some of Hendrix’s other novels. This takes nothing away from the story and actually adds to the tension throughout the bulk of the book. There is always a scene or two in any Hendrix novel that makes you uncomfortable when you read it. This book is no exception, but the particular scene in this book happens so late in the story that my anticipation of the scene grew when each page passed without the scene in question. There were a few spots when I was sure this uncomfortable scene would take place, and it didn’t. This drew me further into the story and kept me reading. When the scene finally hit, the payoff was fantastic and the wait was worth it.
If you haven’t read a Grady Hendrix book before you can’t really go wrong with any of his books, but The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is a great place to start. It’s a book about books and a book about community and how the pressures of family and friends can change the way a person thinks. Strong 5/5 on this one. Go read it.
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