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The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires : A Novel - Grady Hendrix

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

A Novel

By: Grady Hendrix

Hardcover | 7 April 2020

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Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the '90s about a women's book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a blood-sucking fiend.

Patricia Campbell had always planned for a big life, but after giving up her career as a nurse to marry an ambitious doctor and become a mother, Patricia's life has never felt smaller. The days are long, her kids are ungrateful, her husband is distant, and her to-do list is never really done. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a group of Charleston mothers united only by their love for true-crime and suspenseful fiction. In these meetings, they're more likely to discuss the FBI's recent siege of Waco as much as the ups and downs of marriage and motherhood.

But when an artistic and sensitive stranger moves into the neighborhood, the book club's meetings turn into speculation about the newcomer. Patricia is initially attracted to him, but when some local children go missing, she starts to suspect the newcomer is involved. She begins her own investigation, assuming that he's a Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. What she uncovers is far more terrifying, and soon she and her book club are the only people standing between the monster they've invited into their homes and their unsuspecting community.

About the Author

Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter based in New York City. His novels include Horrorst , named one of the best books of 2014 by NPR, and My Best Friend's Exorcism , for which the Wall Street Journal dubbed him "a national treasure." The Bram Stoker Award-winning Paperbacks from Hell, a survey of outrageous horror novels of the 1970s and '80s, was called "pure, demented delight" by the New York Times Book Review. His most recent novel, We Sold Our Souls, was an NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour Pick and an i09 Fall Preview Pick. He has contributed to Playboy, The Village Voice, and Variety.
Industry Reviews
Included in The New York Times Book Review's 2020 Summer Reading issue!
#1 April 2020 LibraryReads Pick
April 2020 Indie Next Pick
Amazon Best Book of April 2020
A Library Journal Editors' Pick for April 2020
The A.V. Club Best Book of April 2020
POPSUGAR Best of April 2020
Goodreads Big Book of Spring 2020

"Ghosts of the past have also inspired one of the most rollicking, addictive novels I've read in years: THE SOUTHERN BOOK CLUB'S GUIDE TO SLAYING VAMPIRES by Grady Hendrix, a tale of housewives battling vampires that is sweetly painful, like hard candy that breaks a tooth."--Danielle Trussoni for The New York Times Book Review

"A delight...its incisive social commentary and meaningful character development make The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires not just a palatable read for non-horror fans, but a winning one."--USA Today, 3.5 out of 4 star review

"The novel is a charming testament to friendships and life's imperfections, with dashes of rot and savagery to earn its keep in horror literature....It's a rollercoaster [that] lands as a vampire story concreted in vileness and Southern charm."--Fangoria

"[Hendrix] remains excellent at staging page-turning sequences of excitement and anxiety...[and] a master of adding little details that fill in the landscape of his Southern-fried world."--The A.V. Club

"[A] clever, addictive vampire thriller....This powerful, eclectic novel both pays homage to the literary vampire canon and stands singularly within it."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Hendrix cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he's a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet. Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Hendrix has masterfully blended the disaffected housewife trope with a terrifying vampire tale, and the anxiety and tension are palpable...a cheeky, spot-on pick for book clubs."--Booklist, starred review

"A vampire's hunger for blood may be insatiable, but this masterpiece novel ladles out ample thrills, chills, and relevant examples of sociopolitical injustices to satisfy any literary appetite."--Foreword Reviews, starred review

"In turns heartwarming and enraging, bloody horror and social critique, this genre-bending vampire story helps cement horror as a frontier for feminist storytelling."--BookPage

"Book Club lures you in with the bucolic setting, charming women, and Southern affect, but when it turns, it does a hairpin one-eighty, goes and spins sedys in the police parking lot while screaming obscenities, then turns around and delivers the vigilante-style vindication that we--and Patricia--so desperately deserve."--Tor.com

"The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires is funny and warm and it's genuinely creepy and disturbing. Grady re-creates a time and place without the dangerous, distortive lens of nostalgia."--Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World

"Grady Hendrix has cemented his place as a literary luminary with The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires. Hendrix has taken his genuine affection for housewives and their work, and folded it seamlessly into a horrifying story of social decay and community betrayal. Cancel your plans and lock your doors -- you won't be able to stop reading this one until the very end"--Sarah Gailey, Hugo-Award winning author of Magic for Liars

"Every vampire novel is going to have blood and teeth, but this one's got that one essential ingredient that nobody else does like Grady Hendrix: heart. These aren't characters, they're people, and I consider myself lucky to have known them for a few pages."--Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Only Good Indians

More praise for Grady Hendrix:

"National treasure Grady Hendrix follows his classic account of a haunted IKEA-like furniture showroom, Horrorstor (2014), with a nostalgia-soaked ghost story, My Best Friend's Exorcism."--The Wall Street Journal, on My Best Friend's Exorcism

"Pure, demented delight."--The New York Times Book Review, on Paperbacks from Hell

"Horrorstoer delivers a crisp terror-tale...[and] Hendrix strikes a nice balance between comedy and horror."--The Washington Post, on Horrorstoer

"Terrific... Sharply written... [My Best Friend's Exorcism] makes a convincing case for [Hendrix's] powers as a sharp observer of human behavior."--The A.V. Club, on My Best Friend's Exorcism

"Hendrix's darkest novel yet will leave readers begging for an encore."--Booklist, starred review, on We Sold Our Souls

"A true appreciation of the genre."--Los Angeles Times, on Paperbacks from Hell

"Campy. Heartfelt. Horrifying."--Minnesota Public Radio, on My Best Friend's Exorcism

"An inventive, hilarious haunted house tale."--Bustle, on Horrorstoer

"Clever, heartfelt, and get-under-your-skin unnerving."--Fangoria, on My Best Friend's Exorcism

"A good, creepy, music-tinged thriller."--CNET, on We Sold Our Souls

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