The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

The first two chapters provide an abundance of context and world building by placing the reader in the middle of a problem Patricia Campbell is facing: She is ill-prepared to lead her book club’s discussion. Even though Patricia needs to “get out of the house and meet new people” (15), it is clear from the first few pages that the reason she has neglected her book club is that she spends most of her days looking out for other people in her family. The novel opens steeped in themes of trying to fulfill the role of dutiful mother and wife, as Patricia and the rest of the members of the mystery book club contend with the expectations of patriarchy and extremely strict gender roles. Despite wanting to “expose [them]selves to thoughts and ideas from outside Mt. Pleasant” (21), the women cannot find the energy, engagement, or time to follow through on their aspirations.

The novel contrasts two kinds of reading materials. The group Patricia initially belongs to is committed to reading highbrow, critically lauded, or socially important literature. Cry, the Beloved Country, a 1948 novel by South African writer and anti-apartheid activist Alan Stewart Paton, is about racial injustice in a country soon to succumb to apartheid. It is clear that we are meant to find echoes of the South African regime Paton excoriated in the Old Village community to which Patricia belongs—the American South has never fully acknowledged its mistreatment of Black people, a theme which will prove important to the novel. However, the women of the book group do not want to read this novel; instead, they gravitate toward mystery stories and true crime books. Their first selection is telling: Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs by Jim Atkinson and Joe Bob Briggs is a 1984 recounting of a grisly axe murder of one housewife by another in a small Texas town. In other words, the women of Patricia’s circle want to read about women much like themselves rather than consider worldly events or the shape of history.

The novel presents this insularity as a good thing at first, as the theme of friendship among women is one of the backbones of the novel. Though Patricia feels that “these women were too different from her” and she “didn’t belong” (29), the novel makes it clear that these women are much more alike than they are different—something that Patricia finds comforting and fulfilling, but which adds a darker note to later parts of the novel.