The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady HendrixMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I was pretty excited to dive into a book that featured a book club and vampires, especially for my October book club read. Unfortunately, I was disappointed in the strength of the characters, and there wasn’t much slaying of vampires. I’d say there was one vampire, and the way it was described sounded more like some gross bug creature man instead of a traditional vampire. I guess he had the charm thing down, but slaying vampires is very misleading for what this book turned out to be.
Things started out a bit slow, but I wanted to give the book a chance because the title sounded pretty interesting. Once we found out about the so-called vampire, things picked up a little bit and piqued my interest. But then things turned sour really quickly for me with the direction this book took the reader. I’d like to warn any readers that there are some gross and graphically described scenes in this book and I’d warn any people sensitive to sexual assault to maybe stay away from this book.
The book club started out mainly as women and then it grew bigger and men got involved. As you can guess it made the book club suck. All the characters were dumb in this book and I couldn’t find myself connecting or liking any of them by the very end. At one point a little close to halfway through, I literally put the book down and said to myself “a man wrote this” and I was right. I say this because the characterization of women in this was so subpar. Yes, the men had their issues too but the women were supposed to be at the forefront of this book and it felt more like women in the 50s or 60s instead of women in the 90s.
I’d say some tense action scenes made the book entertaining. But, most of the book was one woman trying to convince others that their neighbor was a monster and it was just boring. I didn’t care for the crazy woman trope. Even when the women band together it felt lackluster. I guess you can say I was sorely disappointed by a book that sounded pretty interesting. Don’t judge a book on its title.
The only reason I’m giving it 2 stars is because it had some good scenes written in but they weren’t enough for me to recommend this book to others. This is not a book for vampire fans. This is not a book for people who enjoy strong and well-developed female characters. It’s up to you if you want to take a chance on this book but the action scenes are probably less than a quarter of the book anyways. I didn’t even get cool 90s nostalgic vibes from this either. It was a meh read for me.
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