Sometimes the scariest thing in a vampire novel is hearing, “I believe him, not you.”
”“Sometimes she craved a little danger. And that was why she had book club.”
Patricia’s greatest problem is not that she cannot recognize the monster. It is that recognizing him gives her almost no power to stop him.
Her sense of self and her confidence in her own judgment have been chipped away at so thoroughly that even what she sees with her own eyes becomes something she can be persuaded to doubt. Especially when believing herself means going directly against the life she has built and the people she is supposed to trust.
Reading Patricia is incredibly frustrating because inside you are screaming at her: You saw it. You know what happened. Believe yourself.
But I get Patricia.
I don’t like it. I feel like I would have smacked that husband somewhere around page fifty, but I get it. One of the reasons I adore Hendrix’s novels so much is that they get under your skin, and Patricia absolutely did that to me.
She is brilliantly characterized.
It will not give much away to say James Harris is more than he seems.
Ted Bundy comes up periodically throughout the book, along with that wonderful hindsight people have about monsters once everyone knows they were monsters. How could anyone not have known? If it talks like a duck, walks like a duck, drives like a duck, well, it’s a fucking duck.
Except James Harris doesn’t look like one.
He is gracious, charismatic, good-looking, financially valuable, and useful. People like having him around. Great things can come from knowing a man like James Harris.
And that is what makes him so insidious.
The community has reasons not to see what he is. Or maybe they just don’t want to. Because once you see the monster, really see him, you become responsible for what you do next. Ignorance is much more comfortable.
The men in this story are completely infuriating. The husbands minimize, patronize, control, and discredit their wives in different ways. Patricia’s husband, Carter, is especially egregious.
At times he made me almost angrier than the vampire.
James Harris is his own category of bad, but Carter is recognizable, and I think that is why I found him so much more maddening. He believes himself reasonable while diminishing Patricia at nearly every turn. He gaslights her. He undermines her. And because he is a psychiatrist, there is an extra maliciousness to it. He knows the language. He knows how doubt works. He knows how to make Patricia question herself, and how to make everyone around her question her too.
James Harris may have the teeth, but there are plenty of other horrors running around this book.
Race also plays a major role here, and I don’t think you can talk seriously about the novel without talking about it.
Hendrix makes a very deliberate distinction between what happens in Patricia’s affluent white neighborhood and what happens to Black families elsewhere. James understands that distinction and uses it. He knows whose disappearances will matter, who will be believed, and whose suffering can be waved away with some version of, “That’s just them doing that.”
That is ugly as hell.
James knows exactly where he can hunt because he knows which victims society is less likely to go looking for.
Was all of this handled well?
I’m still not entirely sure.
I see what Hendrix is doing. I understand the point about poorer communities, and particularly Black communities, being ignored or discredited by institutions that are supposed to protect them. That is absolutely real. But many of the victims here are children, and that bothered me in a different way. Maybe this is me wanting humanity to be better than it is, but children feel like one of those lines where I want to believe people would come together and say, no, absolutely fucking not.
And yet we know that isn’t always true either.
So I’m torn on this part of the book. I think the idea works. I’m less certain the novel gives it all the space it deserves, especially by the end. Some of it felt shrugged off when I wanted Hendrix to stay there and dig harder.
There are a lot of things in this book that frustrated me, but most of them are not actually complaints about the book. They are things happening inside it that made me furious.
Patricia’s passivity can be maddening. I wanted her to believe her own eyes and ears for once and step up. The husbands sometimes become so awful that you can almost feel the author stacking the deck against the women. Carter especially walks that line.
But then I come right back around to the fact that Carter is a psychiatrist.
He would know exactly which buttons to push. He would know how to make Patricia doubt herself. He would know what words to use to make everyone else doubt her too.
So maybe I’m mad because it works.
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires contains blood, rats, violence, body horror, and a genuinely monstrous vampire.
None of those things are what made me angriest.
Sometimes the most terrifying sentence in horror isn’t There’s a monster in the house.
It’s I believe him, not you.
And that, more than the blood or the teeth, is what stuck with me. Monsters survive because people find reasons not to call them monsters. Because the person pointing at them is inconvenient, hysterical, embarrassing, unreliable, or simply easier to dismiss.
James Harris is terrifying.
But everyone who looks the other way is what lets him eat.
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