Vampires are my favorite monsters.
In much of Western film and literature, vampires represent a threat to the social order a community relies upon. But they’re not the kind of threat that attacks directly in a loud, confrontational way.
No, a vampire is sneaky and conniving, hiding behind charm, social graces, borrowed institutional power, and sex appeal. They exploit cracks in the social order, aggravate tensions in personal relationships, and leverage human weakness to satisfy their thirst.
The worst part is that we all know real people like that. And that’s why I’ve always appreciated how elegant and accurate the vampire is as a monster archetype.
The breakdown of personal, social, and community bonds is a subject I’ve been reflecting on lately. This is no surprise, given my own life and the chaotic economic and political shifts felt around the world. As a result, I found myself gravitating to one of my favorite horror novels, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (2020), by Grady Hendrix.
I’ve always appreciated Hendrix’s writing. He possesses an uncanny ability to tap into the underlying mechanisms of how and why a particular horror subgenre resonates and meld it with pop culture, nostalgia, and poignant human relationships. As a longtime fan, I find Southern Book Club’s Guide to be his most mature, compelling, and satisfying work.
Who Gets Believed
Spanning the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires follows Patricia, a wife and stay-at-home mom. Patricia should be happy with her life. Her husband is a doctor. Her children are healthy and want for nothing. She lives in Mt. Pleasant, an idyllic, affluent suburb of Charleston, South Carolina. But Patricia feels deeply unsatisfied and bored out of her mind. She feels overworked, overwhelmed, and unappreciated by her family. To regain a degree of individuality, she forms a book club dedicated exclusively to the paperback thrillers and horror novels she loves. She befriends an amazing group of women through the book club, and everything seems great. Until a handsome and mysterious stranger named James Harris moves into the neighborhood.
At the same time, something is killing the children in Six Mile, the poor, predominantly Black part of town. Mrs. Greene, a Black nurse who has worked for several Mt. Pleasant families and has started caring for Patricia’s aging mother-in-law, raises the alarm. She tells Patricia that she saw James’ white van in the area. This revelation leads Patricia down a treacherous path to learn the truth about his magnetic yet sinister presence, and whether he is linked to the recent string of gory events and deaths that seem to follow him.
But, as everyone keeps telling her, it sounds crazy. Who would believe this story? Why would anyone believe a bored housewife with an appetite for salacious fiction?
What Southern Book Club’s Guide Gets Right, and What It Doesn’t
Steeped in Southern culture and spiked with plenty of dark humor, Southern Book Club‘s Guide is one hell of a read. I never thought I’d want my sweet tea served by an immaculately dressed woman with a lovely Carolina drawl who was going to turn around and go vampire slaying, but I sure do now.
As a mom myself, I always come back to a core theme: these women learn that decades of cloistered domestic life have not totally robbed them of strength and agency. If anything, motherhood gave them the exact skillset necessary to defeat the biggest evil their community would ever face.
I am forever haunted by certain gnarly descriptions of things encountered in a certain attic, and the depictions of the female relationships are realistic and genuinely moving. The exploration of racism is notable for such a novel because it doesn’t try to hide the reality of how the systemic racism of this time in this part of America often took the form of apathy, complacency, and willful ignorance and called it peace.
Though it is worth noting that, for as careful as Hendrix is to depict the reality of this structural racism, he doesn’t quite escape the same tired racial tropes. Specifically, Mrs. Greene is introduced as a very promising supporting character with her own agency, who is the first one to raise the alarm and provide a crucial clue about who is responsible for the deaths of children. But then Hendrix relegates her off-page for much of the novel, until the main character needs her for the bloody climax.
In this way, she is effectively reduced to a plot device—present when useful, absent when not. A novel that understands so acutely the harm in treating some people as people and others as disposable shouldn’t be doing it to the only primary character who is Black.
The real challenge, however, is deciding they must act instead of looking the other way.
The Vampire and the Invitation
Vampires are only dangerous if you let them be, and you do that by inviting them in. The vampire is all too happy to help you think that you can let your guard down and that there’s no threat. The vampire will say anything to make you feel special, indispensable, chosen—they need you to believe it until you have served your purpose. They wrote the book on manipulation, gaslighting, and pitting people against each other.
They are particularly dangerous when they can ingratiate themselves with and corrupt those who hold social and economic power in a situation. It’s seen in everything from Dracula and its countless adaptations (Dracula literally hiring lawyers and buying real estate) to Sinners (the vampire Remmick appeals to a racist Klan couple to escape Choctaw vampire hunters, and their racism costs them everything).
James Harris spreads evil because Patricia helps him, despite her misgivings. Her husband and his friends are all too eager to make boatloads of money, so they look past his shadiness. The neighborhood at large is ready to accept a handsome, rich man to make them look good and get richer. And James gives them enough reason to remain willfully ignorant. The sexual tension. The too-good-to-be-true real estate deals. The why-wouldn’t-it-be-sincere way he presents himself as an upstanding member of the community.
All the while, he’s preying on the Black children from the poor side of town before turning his sights on the children of Mt. Pleasant.
Because the really scary part of Southern Book Club’s Guide is how easy it was for a privileged group to decide it was safe. For the white people to not give a single shit about the Black people who cleaned their houses and took care of their elderly. Because they lived “over there.” Because it wasn’t their problem. For a group of men to dismiss their wives. For a family to dismiss the woman who has been quietly making their lives comfortable and frictionless.
Because, lest we forget, the vampire’s insatiable thirst is critical. It will never be quenched. The vampire will never stop. He will always need more people to feed off of.
He’s waiting for Patricia to dismiss Mrs. Greene and what she has seen.
He’s waiting for Patricia’s own husband, guided by his own insatiable selfishness, to publicly call her crazy in a room full of men and trash her reputation to the community.
Because the vampire’s favorite part is when you discover that you were never actually part of the privileged group. You were never untouchable.
Of course, no one is untouchable once the vampire really gets going, and by the time they realize what’s happening, it’s too late.
Our shared Experiences will Always Be Our Best Defense
Hendrix’s point that motherhood is a profound strength isn’t a new thought, though it is an underexplored one in horror. The genre too often explores motherhood through the lens of overwhelming burden (Rosemary’s Baby, The Babadook) or bad, scary mommies (The Others, Bring Her Back).
Hendrix also posits that motherhood is a duty. It confers strength; therefore, it must be used for the good of the entire community. We should look to those women in our lives who we might not think of as deserving of our friendship. We must reach outside of our everyday lives. And we should be prepared to pay the costs of doing what is right, even if we lose the support and connection we desperately wanted. Even if our reputations are dragged through the filth, and we are scapegoated.
Yes, it is painful. Yes, it requires us to take on more hard work. Yes, it would be easier to stay in our little bubbles than to open our hearts. Everything would be so much simpler if we just focused on what we need, on finding support and connection in day-to-day routines, football game watch parties, text groups, and book clubs.
But the James Harrises of the world rely on division. They hide in the cracks we refuse to peer into. They count on us being petty, self-centered, and “too busy” to look at the carnage happening. They want us to think we are far away from the damage they are causing to our neighbors.
Motherhood cannot be the reason you refuse to look.
Check out my Cabinet of Curiousities for more book recommendations.