My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Looks like I have fast forwarded to October and Halloween is already here. There seems to be quite a lot of horror novels in my plate currently.

And now to the book with a quirky title, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires .

A picturesque town, everyone knowing every other person, children allowed to linger outside in the dark, doors remain unlocked, of course there’s nothing to fear in this small cozy Old Village which is safe and peaceful and wonderful place for one’s family to be. It is sometimes so quiet that Patricia Campbell longs for some kind of excitement to spice up her too sedate life. And that is exactly why there is a book club which is ‘not a book club’

Grace, Kitty, Maryellen, Slick and Patricia are the members of this ‘not a book club’ and each of them may seem pliant and passive, obedience to their husband a second nature but when an outside force threatens their very existence, each of them displays strength quite unheard of and along with Mrs. Greene they raise themselves to be the protectors of their family and neighborhood and expunge the evil from their midst.

However, nothing comes easy as a multitude of reasons hamper their fight, for starters not a single person believes Patricia but in spite of the physical abuse, deaths of children, rape, suicide attempt and teenage angst, physical attacks and million other things that can go wrong goes wrong.

I loved the author’s mix of dark humor in this vampiric tale and the showing of the steel resilience underneath the soft exterior of the women, how interconnected each of their lives become when they join hands together but honestly I had nightmares with some scenes involving rats and roaches, which really did give me the creeps and a realization that it is not always the ghosts that scare me but the chilling scenes like those in the book that left me terrified.

There’s the southern charm of the story that hooks the reader brilliantly and the subtle feel of the monster amongst them that escalates the tension as one keeps turning the pages to get to the ending.

Awesome simply coz The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires left a mark!
This review is published in my blog, https://rainnbooks.wordpress.com/ ; Amazon India, Goodreads and Twitter handles.

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.