REVIEW: The Southern Book Club's Guide to Vampire Hunting

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Vampire Hunting
Author: Grady Hendrix

For me this book was like Steel Magnolias or Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe mixed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Southern women pulling together to rid their town of a menace. Well....caricatures of southern women, anyway.

While I enjoyed this story -- the premise was just too fantastic and fun for me, as a midwestern woman transplanted to the south not to enjoy it -- I found myself having to suspend my sense of reality multiple times. Not just because a vampire victimizing children is an impossibility, but because men and women just don't act as depicted in this book unless they are either completely narcissistic, abusive or stupid. And probably not even then. I asked my husband a few questions about male behavior before writing this review just to make sure I was not off the mark. There are some male behaviors and actions in this book that are particularly piggish and ridiculous....from spousal abuse because women are discussing books to disbelieving an eyewitness account of a crime as women imagining things. The men are mostly caricatures of sexist jerks who are more fixated on making money than being human beings. While sexist jerks do exist, a majority of southern men are NOT pigs -- not even in the 80s and 90s when this book is set. A lot of the actions of the male characters seemed contrived....sexism at the speed of plot. Same with the women. More caricatures.....and actions that intelligent women would not do...or put up with.The recipe for southern women from this book seemed a pinch of fake tv women from the 50s and 60s, a bit of 80s movie nostalgia, frosted over with a glaze of a man's idea of how women would think and behave.   It was cringeworthy in some places.

But......the vampire carried the day. The monster aspects of the plot kept me listening to this audio book, even as I cringed my way through ridiculous dialogue and overly sexist melodrama.

My final thoughts -- I enjoyed this book and I'm going to read more by this author because I like his style and ideas. Although the characterizations in the book are problematic for me, those depictions were purposeful to get me into the right emotional frame of mind to be a part of the story. I had to be a bit annoyed and angry to buy into southern women ganging up on an evil lurking right in their own neighborhood. The devil in their own backyard.  While they dealt with some of the nightmares from their own lives as well. Every household has secrets. But at times, the personal lives of the characters seemed like bad plots from the Lifetime Channel.

I listened to the audio book version of this story. Narrated by Bahni Turpin, the audio is almost 14 hours long. An enjoyable listen....Turpin does a great job reading. Great voice acting skills and her accents/depictions of the characters are very well done. Entertaining performance.

A solid 3 stars from me. Would have been a solid 4 or maybe even a 5 if the characters hadn't seemed so contrived and ridiculous to me.