Review: Mount Pleasant mothers vs. the monster in their midst – Charleston Post Courier

THE SOUTHERN BOOK CLUBS GUIDE TO SLAYING VAMPIRES. By Grady Hendrix. Quirk Books. 408 pages. $22.99.

In every book we read, no one ever thought anything bad was happening until it was too late. This is where we live, its where our children live, its our home. Dont you want to do absolutely everything you can to keep it safe?

What if Jerry Dandridge, the charming suburban vampiric antagonist of 1985s Fright Night faced off against the Ya-Ya Sisterhood? Novelist, screenwriter and sometimes journalist Grady Hendrix returns to the Mount Pleasant of his childhood and of his 2016 horror novel My Best Friends Exorcism in a new book that imagines such a scenario. Its not a fair fight.

Although the writing of The Southern Book Clubs Guide to Slaying Vampires predates the COVID-19 global pandemic, the novel is decidedly timely in the myriad ways it addresses anxieties over the vulnerability of the elderly, infirm and economically disenfranchised; and the frightening ease with which irresponsible wielders of authority can be wooed toward greed, vanity and sycophantism over public safety, social justice and civic duty.

Nurse-turned-housewife Patricia Campbell may not be the feminist healer/hero we were expecting, but in her redemptive, self-sacrificing stance against those who would do harm to her family, friends and community, she just might be the hero we need.

Bored by her insular, privileged life in Mount Pleasants Old Village in the 1990s, Patricia finds both escapism and belonging among the not-quite-a-book-club forged by her friends Kitty, Grace, Slick and Maryellen as an act of rebellion against the stifling Literary Guild, an elitist book club in which the great modern works are assigned but never read. As they come to embrace one another and their penchant for sordid pulp fiction and serial killer true crime, these women also reveal heretofore private truths about their personal aspirations and familial complexities as wives and mothers.

Dont you wish something exciting would happen around here? Patricia muses. That wish is fulfilled with the arrival of enigmatic outsider James Harris, and the ease with which he ingratiates himself into the financial well-being of the book club members husbands with the lure of investments in the burgeoning development of gated communities. But James is a parasitic apex predator, an accomplished gaslighter with a centuries-long history of subverting others for personal gain and his own immortal survival.

Once invited in (one of many nods to established literary and cinematic vampire lore), James inserts himself into the Campbell household, corrupting Patricias Nazi-obsessed son Blue and ignored daughter Korey, tempting her psychiatrist husband Carter with notoriety and wealth, and clashing with Patricias mother-in-law Miss Mary, with whom James shares a dark history.

In the parallel but not-so-far removed world of the hardscrabble community of Six Mile, African American children are disappearing and dying mysteriously, reputedly at the hands of a mysterious Boo Man. The deaths are dismissed as drug crimes by unsympathetic law enforcement and go unnoticed by their disconnected white neighbors in the Old Village. A matriarch of Six Mile, Ursula Greene does for the Campbells as Miss Marys caregiver.

Hendrix deftly juxtaposes the socioeconomic inequities between these black and white communities through the ways in which James preys on each of them. But Hendrix also grants glimmers of hope as Mrs. Greene and the women of Patricias book club join forces against their shared enemy, even after Patricia and Kitty fail to protect the children of Six Mile in their eye-opening inaugural visit.

Hendrix excels at crafting the creeping dread of physical harm and the even more horrifying fate of isolation as an ostracized Patricia is met with condescending disbelief and mind-numbing prescription drugs in response to her attempts to protect her family and thwart the neighborhood monster. For the sake of her children, Patricia draws on untested fortitude as she rallies her book club compatriots for a final confrontation against James, unfolding against the backdrop of another contest of mythic proportions: the Carolina-Clemson rivalry.

The Southern Book Clubs Guide to Slaying Vampires will find a deservedly welcoming readership among book club enthusiasts, fans of sophisticated horror fiction and those familiar with the remarkable real women of Mount Pleasant on whom Hendrixs characters are based. Moreover, the novel offers an efficacious affirmation of maternal tenacity and an auspicious call to tend to others in times of crisis, even (and especially) against seemingly insurmountable odds.

Reviewer Jonathan Haupt is the executive director of the Pat Conroy Literary Center and co-editor with Nicole Seitz of "Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy."

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Review: Mount Pleasant mothers vs. the monster in their midst - Charleston Post Courier