The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

Patricia Campbell leads the picture perfect life. A house in the affluent Old Village suburb of Charleston South Carolina, hard working husband and two beautiful kids. She joins a book club with some of the ladies in the community where they escape the humming normalcy of their lives by reading pulpy true crime novels and books featuring serial killers. Things are great.

And then James Harris enters their lives.

Sure this is a blood soaked vampire horror story (though to be honest the most visceral episode in the entire story for me involved a single cockroach) but Grady Hendrix is playing with a lot of themes here.

The housewives may be in mortal danger from a vampiric creature but it turns out the real villain is the patriarchy. As vile as Harris is, it's the husbands that are the monsters here. The women's voices are all invalidated through gaslighting, violence, religion, and careerist concerns. The racial divide is also plumbed as the women can almost excuse their inaction when it's “just” the Black kids disappearing down on Six Mile. The families there are also slowly being displaced by an ambitious new development project called Gracious Cay being led by the charismatic James Harris. A project that makes the book club ladies and their husbands very wealthy to boot. It's easy to just go along with it all - but James harbours a hunger that can't be stopped. Patricia learns that her inaction has led to the horrors seeping into her's and her children's lives. And so she rallies the housewives along with the Black cleaning lady to mount an offence.

God, this whole thing is just a metaphor for white Republican women ignoring all the signs and warnings and willingly inviting a monster into the “House.”