The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “The Bridges of Madison County”

Chapter 9 Summary

Patricia is too nervous to tell the book club she invited James. None of them are thrilled to see him walk through the door, but he charmingly says he has been “looking for a long time for a community like this” (97). He tells the ladies he grew up in Montana (contradicting what he told the banker earlier), where he developed land. He then asks what each of the women’s husbands do, learning that Slick’s husband Leland is also developer. At the mention of this, James brings up his latest project, Gracious Cay—a gated community he is building near Six Mile, Mt. Pleasant’s Black neighborhood. Slick and Leland are investors.

The discussion of The Bridges of Madison County is interrupted by the entrance of a naked, soaking wet Miss Mary. She heatedly accuses James again, trying to show the women a photograph that ostensibly proves her point. However, she wilts when she sees she is holding the “wrong photograph” (101). As Patricia escorts her out, Miss Mary insists she will find the right photograph.

Chapter 10 Summary

After Miss Mary’s outburst, Patricia wonders how much longer the family can handle her living with them. She expresses these concerns to book club member Grace, who reminds Patricia that “‘Men don’t know what it’s like to care for an aging relative’” (105).

That night, Patricia notices that Korey is unnaturally quiet in her bedroom. When Patricia enters Korey’s room to check, Korey tells Patricia that there’s someone on the roof. At first Patricia chalks it up to Korey being frightened by a Stephen King novel, but when she checks on Blue, there is in an unmistakable sound from above. Panicked, Patricia rushes into action, closing the bathroom door just as a hand comes down toward the window, and then dialing 911. During the chaos, James enters the house to help them feel safe until the police arrive.

Chapter 11 Summary

When the excitement of the evening wears off, Patricia decides to check on Miss Mary. Miss Mary, speaking more coherently than she has in a long time, tells Patricia about Hoyt Pickens, a man who came to town when Miss Mary was a child.

Miss Mary’s family were bootleggers, and after Hoyt Pickens declared Miss Mary’s father’s corn liquor was the best he’d had, the two men went into business together. For a while, it was a prosperous partnership, and Hoyt eventually became a frequent guest at Miss Mary’s family’s dinner table. During this time, three children went missing. There were rumors surrounding their disappearances, but no leads were ever followed. The third child was the Reverend’s. Hoyt claimed that Leon Mills, a Black veteran who had suffered a head injury in the war, had been “creeping in places he shouldn’t” and had “slaked his unnatural appetite” by killing the kids (117). Hoyt led the town in lynching Leon.

Hoyt, Miss Mary’s dad, and others put Leon in a brown sack and buried him alive under a peach tree. After that, Hoyt fled town, leaving Miss Mary’s family in financial ruin. Miss Mary ends her story with a warning: “Nightwalking men always have a hunger on them [...] They never stop taking and they don’t know enough. They mortgaged their souls away and now they eat and eat and never know how to stop” (119).

Part 3 Analysis

The relationship between Patricia and James Harris grows into a “powerful attraction that can exist between two strangers” (99), in direct correlation to the book these chapters are named after—The Bridges of Madison County, a 1992 romance novel by Robert James Waller about a WWII war bride who has a passionate affair with photographer in the 1960s. While Patricia never commits adultery with James, there is a clear connection between them strong enough to make her bring him to book club, breaking the women’s homosocial circle without permission and without warning, so that it feels like a violation of a private space. Before they know it, James charms the women into disclosing information about their home lives and husbands, all of which he will use to manipulate the town.

This theme of insinuating but irresistible intrusion recurs throughout the section. At home, Patricia’s family is menaced by someone seemingly attempting to break in from the roof, while James enters the house uninvited to provide ambiguous assistance. Less obviously dangerous—but arguably more sinister—is the incursion by land developers into Mt. Pleasant’s Six Mile neighborhood, inexorably pushing the historically Black residents out of the area in order to create a gated community that these residents will not be able to live in.

Miss Mary’s story of a lynching from her childhood exposes the rot at the heart of Mt. Pleasant and the ways that the safety Patricia prizes above all else has come about—at the expense of innocents like Leon and the murdered children. Exclusionary “safety” is about racist assumptions, injustice, and terror rather than actual protection.