“This funny and fresh take on a classic tale manages to comment on gender roles, racial disparities, and white privilege all while creeping me all the way out. So good.”—Zakiya Dalila Harris, author of The Other Black Girl Steel Magnolias meets Dracula in this New York Times best-selling horror novel about a women's book club that must do battle with a mysterious newcomer to their small Southern town. Bonus features: • Reading group guide for book clubs • Hand-drawn map of Mt. Pleasant • Annotated true-crime reading list by Grady Hendrix • And more! Patricia Campbell’s life has never felt smaller. Her husband is a workaholic, her teenage kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she’s always a step behind on her endless to-do list. The only thing keeping her sane is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime. At these meetings they’re as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are about their own families. One evening after book club, Patricia is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbor, bringing the neighbor's handsome nephew, James Harris, into her life. James is well traveled and well read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn’t felt in years. But when children on the other side of town go missing, their deaths written off by local police, Patricia has reason to believe James Harris is more of a Bundy than a Brad Pitt. The real problem? James is a monster of a different kind—and Patricia has already invited him in. Little by little, James will insinuate himself into Patricia’s life and try to take everything she took for granted—including the book club—but she won’t surrender without a fight in this blood-soaked tale of neighborly kindness gone wrong.

This discussion really descended into a pretty divisive argument, so I'll keep in brief. On one side, the majority of NUBClub thought Hendrix's novel about southern mothers dealing with a vampire in their town a pretty good read: decently but not greatly written, plotted well, and with very believable characters. As a horror story, it had some good horror parts and was overall well-paced and a fun read. In particular, we thought the novel was pretty deft with issues of race and particularly gender. The other side hated the novel, because they felt the novel's introduction set up a work that praised the strength of mothers and then showed us racist and weak characters who did nothing heroic at all. A lot of this hinged on the fact that the vampire in the town, who was pretending to be a friend to the White townspeople, was systematically hunting Black youth from a poorer part of the city. The book's haters thought this was a cheap gesture; the book said explicit about the racism in the town, and thus was just using the Black characters to get cheap identity points. The majority of us vociferously disagreed. We pointed out that the Black characters actually call out the protagonists for not caring about Black lives, and we observed that we recognized the racist attitudes of the town BECAUSE Hendrix rendered them so well. We didn't feel like we needed explicit statements about race when we all walk away recognizing the racism. That said, Melanie and others argued convincing that the novel was really about misogyny -- the way that the core women were oppressed literally by the vampire and more pervasively and more quietly by their husbands. Most of us felt that Hendrix was showing us flawed women who when pushed to the limit and clearly too late, take action to save their town. It's a condemnation of small town tribalism and misogyny wrapped in a poppy dark horror genre. Your mileage may vary here though, depending on how you feel treatments of race need to be handled.