This book is exactly what you think it is. A suburban woman's book club that must protect their community from a vampire. Literally. We follow Patricia, a former nurse and now stay at home mom, as she navigates the community in the new town her family has moved to. This seemingly perfect town outside Charleston, South Carolina has been a life goal but now that she's achieved it, she is faced with the reality of a distant husband, cranky teenage kids, and a constant revolving list of chores. Her one reprieve is the local book club that reads true-crime and thrillers - a true escape from her otherwise boring life. Boring, that is, until a tall, dark, and handsome stranger comes to town and charms everyone. But when children start going missing, Patricia and the book club must gather up the strength to fight for her family and her community.
This book was released about a year ago and was one of the most talked about books in the bookish circles I follow. It sounded really interesting and I was pretty convinced I would love it but it was so hyped up that I just couldn't bring myself to actually pick it up. As a personal rule with any media (movies, TV shows, books, etc), if something is so widely talked about and so widely loved, I wait at least 6 months to let the hype die down. I don't enjoy having my expectations set so high that the actual product would be an almost guaranteed let down. So I put this book on my TBR list and went about my life until enough time had passed that I felt I could give the book an honest chance. Am I a year late to the party? Yep. Do I regret it? Nope. Because this book ended up really working for me on almost every point. But it wasn't exactly what I was expecting from all the hype so I think if I had read it a year ago, I think I would have ended up liking it but being disappointed overall. However, giving it the chance to breathe means this book is probably making my top list of favorites for the year.
The characters were my absolutely favorite parts of this book. There are a lot of characters, which I normally struggle with, but they were all so distinct and filled particular roles in the story that I was able to keep everyone straight and I didn't feel like there were unnecessary characters just floating about. Patricia is our main character and the book club and her family are the main secondary characters that we get the most information about. Then we have the book club member's families and other neighbors that Patricia interacts with on occasion who aren't really fleshed out more than their relationship and maybe their job. Since we are centered on Patricia for the story and it is told in third person close perspective, most of the information we have about other characters are based on what she sees or knows about them which was really interesting. I did like how, throughout the course of the story, we got character development from all the women in the book club and while, at times, the development was frustrating to read about, I think all the characters stayed wholly authentic to their own arcs. We start off with Patricia being a bit judgemental about the other women and how they handle themselves but as she becomes better friends, they really start to feel like a support system and not just neighborhood acquaintances.
The overall plot and themes the book explored were also fantastic. In a forward at the beginning, Hendrix explains how he thought of the idea for the book and the part that stuck with me was the line about how he wanted to see his mom vs Dracula - it was such a great image to keep in mind when reading the book. I find horror books fascinating on a thematic level because they are often lenses through which we can explore deep fears, either personal fears or societal fears. In the case of this story, we see examples of white, upper class people wanting to use their privilege for good until those actions would threaten their own life. There's a really interesting exploration and examination of what it means to be an 'outsider' or and 'other' in communities. These themes are laid out, but Hendrix isn't super heavy handed with them so they didn't distract from the overall enjoyment of the book. Instead, the book leaves room for reader introspection and, toward the end, we can see the result and 'lessons' the characters learned through how the events of the book were handled. I think these sorts of themes are most often talked about in books that get labeled as 'hard hitting contemporaries' and while all genres can have lesson or explorations of themes in them, I don't think examples like this book are talked about nearly as much. And maybe that's because a smaller number of readers would pick up a book about vampires if they wanted a sort of social commentary type of reading experience or maybe because the lessons on how to act when a vampire comes to town aren't as immediately applicable to daily life. And even if we were to leave the themes out of the discussion, the plot of the book was great. It was a fun ride and had enough secondary plot points and arcs that I was always engaged with the story.
The one aspect of this book that I didn't really like was the pacing in the second part of the book. There are a number of time jumps in the book, usually just skipping forward a month to the next book club meeting. However, there is one larger jump in the middle of the book where we jump years into the future. I get that this jump allowed us to see the extent of the results from the first half of the book. We see how Patricia acts now and her relationships with her children and we see how the community has accepted and embraced this stranger and how he's helping their businesses. So on a conceptual level, I understand it, but from a reader perspective, I wanted to see all of that development. Patricia is a pretty broken person on the inside but she's putting on a good show for all these people and I wanted to see how she got to that point. It felt like we had missed out on a lot of character growth for many of the characters and were just told that things are different now because of X. But I wanted to see those gradual changes in attitudes and personal relationships. The fact that the change was so sudden took me out of the story for a while and I had to readjust my perceptions and understanding of these characters before I could get completely immersed back into the story. I would have preferred if we had a few smaller jumps of maybe 4 months at a time so the reader could have seen these changes and how they came about and how other characters reacted at the time.
Finally, I do want to mention how perfectly bloody this book was for me. I know that every person has their own personal limits to how much they can tolerate when it comes to blood and gore but I found that this book really had a perfect mix of psychological horror and physical horror. I found this story to be like 85% psychological horror where we're following Patricia as she's working on her theories to what could be happening in her area and grappling with how absurd the information she's finding out actually is. However, in that other 15%, Hendrix is pretty brutal in all the best ways. The bloody scenes were very action heavy which I think ended up working very well so the gore never felt really overdone or like some sort of B-movie bloodbath. I found these scenes to be dynamic and very clear on who was doing what and where everyone was so I was able to stay in the story and didn't have to re-read sections to figure out what was going on. We get two main bloody scenes in the first 1/3 of the book and then we settle into Patricia's investigation and mostly some creepy psychological stuff happening. The book finishes, however, with a real banger of a bloodbath. Without getting into spoilers, I'll just say that I was both surprised and ecstatic that Hendrix went there with the ending - this is a vampire story afterall.
Overall, I absolutely loved this book - well rounded characters, suspenseful plot, balance of blood vs psychological horror. Pacing in the second part of the book was a little bit of a miss for me, but didn't hinder my enjoyment overall too much.
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