The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

If you’re like me and you’re as drawn to a book’s title and cover as you are the contents of the book itself, then you’ll love this one. Grady Hendrix has a knack for writing about horror against the most banal, ordinary, American backgrounds. I think of him as the literary version of the Duffer Brothers in the sense that he, like they’ve done with Stranger Things, is able to take the best tropes of horror and not only turn them upside down but put them against a backdrop of ordinary, everyday life in a timeframe so familiar to us because most of us grew up then and can recognize the cultural and societal expectations of the time.

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is both satire and horror and it balances perfectly between the two. Patricia is a housewife in the mid-90s living in Charleston, in a very exclusive neighborhood called Pierates Cruze. She’s the average Southern belle turned wife/mom/daughter-in-law. Her husband is a doctor and works all the time; her two kids are teenagers and are perfectly horrible; she caretakes for her elderly, senile mother-in-law and of course, she has her group of friends who are equally boring, wealthy and proper……except they really aren’t. Well, they never are, are they?

Their original book club fizzles out due to the sheer boringness of the books chosen by the first book club head, so Patricia, Kitty, Grace, Maryellen and Slick form their own book club in which they read true crime and horror and any manner of horrendous novels. So when James Harris moves in next door in all his scary, sexy glory and Patricia starts experiencing and seeing some very weird and frightening things, she is in the right mindset for horror. James claims to be the nephew of the awful old woman who suffers a psychotic episode and attacks Patricia, their house is overrun with vicious rats who – and this scene is not for the faint of heart (I skimmed it) – attack Patricia’s mother-in-law so viciously that she dies, and with this and some other gruesome goings-on, Patricia begins to strongly suspect the new neighbor is a vampire.

Though the horror is intense and quite gross at times, for me the true horror was how easily Patricia is made to feel like she is crazy, how she is ostracized within her own group of friends, how her husband subjugates her, and how easy it is for her to doubt herself and question her own sanity when she knows what she has seen and when she tries to get people to realize what is going on. That was more monstrous than any vampire – that absolute lack of self-worth, lack of self-esteem, lack of any true resources of one’s own. I kept wanting to shake her and smack her upside the head to get her to realize that she did not have to allow herself to be treated the way she was.

I like a good twist on a horror trope as much as the next girl, and Hendrix delivers. He is in that same modern group of horror novelists such as Paul Tremblay, Jason Arnopp and F.G. Cottam – and I have blogged all of them previously – who run with the horror tropes of vampires, ghosts, haunted houses, werewolves, demonic possession, home invasion and the occult – and give them new life by completely presenting them in unexpected ways. Hendrix kicks ass with this updated edition of Dracula. This vampire is meaner, grosser, way more visceral and so much more loathsome than the Count himself ever could be. This vampire still controls the mean creatures of the earth – bats, rats, bugs. This vampire is still dangerously sexy and able to entice its victims and he still needs to be invited over the threshold to enter a home……all little grace notes that I appreciated. But this vampire is the most vicious I’ve run across in modern literature and Hendrix is one hell of a visceral writer. Don’t read this while you’re eating……which I realize is ironic, considering the point of my blog. 🙂 Just don’t. Trust me on this.

And of course, being set in the South, there is food. Lots of food, and exactly the type of food you’d expect from upper-class, wealthy Southern housewives – Boston cream pie, peach pie, any variety of casseroles, a crab boil, a massive amount of cocktails, Swedish meatballs, and of course, the inevitable party finger food consisting of crudités, ham biscuits, pimiento cheese sandwiches and my favorite, cheese straws. You can’t have a party in the Deep South and not have cheese straws. You’d get thrown out of Tara like Scarlett O’Hara, my dear!

The party spilled from the living room into the dining room, where it swirled in a circle around a table overflowing with miniature ham biscuits, cheese straws, pimento cheese sandwiches, and a tray of crudités that would be thrown out untouched tomorrow morning…….

This is the method for Southern-style cheese straws I used, based on the recipe by the late, great Edna Lewis, who is one of the great African-American chefs of the last 100 years and whose classic cookbook Taste of Country Cooking is one of my favorites.

INGREDIENTS
1 and 2/3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper, or more to taste
1 stick unsalted butter, at room temperature and cut into pieces
2 and 1/2 cups extra-sharp cheddar cheese, coarsely grated
2 tablespoons water

METHOD
Sift the flour, mustard, salt and cayenne into a medium bowl.

Using your most awesome red Kitchen Aid with the paddle attachment, beat together the cheese and butter on low until well blended.

Gradually mix in the flour mixture until completely incorporated, then add the water and beat for another few minutes until the dough comes together.

Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead a few times, then roll it out into a rough rectangle on a parchment sheet-covered baking tray, and chill about half an hour.

Heat the oven to 425F, and trim the dough edges, cut in half, then again into strips roughly 6 inches by 1/4″, but don’t get out the ruler. Just long, skinny strips will work.

Bake for 20 minutes, or until they’re golden-brown, crisp, and you can smell the cheese. Let cool and enjoy with soup, salad, or as a snack with your evening cocktail. Any Southern belle would surely approve!