ALSO BY GRADY HENDRIX
Horrorstör
My Best Friend’s Exorcism
Paperbacks from Hell
We Sold Our Souls
This is a work of fiction. All names, places, and characters are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Grady Hendrix
All rights reserved. Except as authorized under U.S. copyright law, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hendrix, Grady, author.
The southern book club’s guide to slaying vampires / Grady Hendrix. Summary: “A supernatural thriller set in South Carolina in the ’90s about a women’s book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious stranger who turns out to be a real monster”—Provided by publisher.
2019037437
GSAFD: Horror fiction. | Suspense fiction.
PS3608.E543 S68 2020 | 813/.6—dc23
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Ebook ISBN 9781683691440
Cover designed by Andie Reid
Cover illustration by Liz Wheaton
Interior designed by Molly Rose Murphy
Interior illustration by Dan Funderburgh
Production management by John J. McGurk
Quirk Books
215 Church Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
quirkbooks.com
v5.4_r1
a
For Amanda,
Wherever all the pieces of you are…
Contents
Cover
Also by Grady Hendrix
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Prologue
Cry, The Beloved Country
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Helter Skelter
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
The Bridges of Madison County
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
The Stranger Beside Me
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Psycho
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Three Years Later…
Clear and Present Danger
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
In Cold Blood
Chapter 42
Happy Holidays, Book Clubbers!
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A few years ago I wrote a book called My Best Friend’s Exorcism about two teenage girls in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1988, at the height of the Satanic Panic. They become convinced that one of them is possessed by Satan and, consequently, things go poorly.
That novel was written from a teenage point of view, and so the parents seemed awful because that’s how parents seem when you’re a teenager. But there’s another version of that story, told from the parents’ point of view, about how helpless you feel when your kid is in danger. I wanted to write a story about those parents, and so The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires was born. It’s not a sequel to My Best Friend’s Exorcism, but it takes place in the same neighborhood, a few years later, where I grew up.
When I was a kid I didn’t take my mom seriously. She was a housewife who was in a book club, and she and her friends were always running errands, and driving car pool, and forcing us to follow rules that didn’t make sense. They just seemed like a bunch of lightweights. Today I realize how many things they were dealing with that I was totally unaware of. They took the hits so we could skate by obliviously, because that’s the deal: as a parent, you endure pain so your children don’t have to.
This is also a book about vampires. They’re that iconic American archetype of the rambling man, wearing denim, wandering from town to town with no past and no ties. Think Jack Kerouac, think Shane, think Woody Guthrie. Think Ted Bundy.
Because vampires are the original serial killers, stripped of everything that makes us human—they have no friends, no family, no roots, no children. All they have is hunger. They eat and eat but they’re never full. With this book, I wanted to pit a man freed from all responsibilities but his appetites against women whose lives are shaped by their endless responsibilities. I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom.
As you’ll see, it’s not a fair fight.
PROLOGUE
This story ends in blood.
Every story begins in blood: a squalling baby yanked from the womb, bathed in mucus and half a quart of their mother’s blood. But not many stories end in blood these days. Usually it’s a return to the hospital and a dry, quiet death surrounded by machines after a heart attack in the driveway, a stroke on the back porch, or a slow fade from lung cancer.
This story begins with five little girls, each born in a splash of her mother’s blood, cleaned up, patted dry, then turned into proper young ladies, instructed in the wifely arts to become perfect partners and responsible parents, mothers who help with homework and do the laundry, who belong to church flower societies and bunco clubs, who send their children to cotillion and private schools.
You’ve seen these women. They meet for lunch and laugh loudly enough for everyone in the restaurant to hear. They get silly after a single glass of wine. Their idea of living on the edge is to buy a pair of Christmas earrings that light up. They agonize far too long over whether or not to order dessert.
As respectable individuals, their names will appear in the paper only three times: when they’re born, when they get married, and when they die. They are gracious hostesses. They are generous to those less fortunate. They honor their husbands and nurture their children. They understand the importance of everyday china, the responsibility of inheriting Great-Grandmother’s silver, the value of good linen.
And by the time this story is over, they will be covered in blood.
Some of it will be theirs. Some of it will belong to others. But they will drip with it. They will swim in it. They will drown in it.
Housewife (n)—a light, worthless woman or girl
—Oxford English Dictionary, compact edition, 1971
CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY
November 1988
CHAPTER 1
In 1988, George H. W. Bush h
ad just won the presidential election by inviting everyone to read his lips while Michael Dukakis lost it by riding in a tank. Dr. Huxtable was America’s dad, Kate & Allie were America’s moms, The Golden Girls were America’s grandmoms, McDonald’s announced it was opening its first restaurant in the Soviet Union, everyone bought Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and didn’t read it, Phantom of the Opera opened on Broadway, and Patricia Campbell got ready to die.
She sprayed her hair, put on her earrings, and blotted her lipstick, but when she looked at herself in the mirror she didn’t see a housewife of thirty-nine with two children and a bright future, she saw a dead person. Unless war broke out, the oceans rose, or the earth fell into the sun, tonight was the monthly meeting of the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant, and she hadn’t read this month’s book. And she was the discussant. Which meant that in less than ninety minutes she would stand up in front of a room full of women and lead them in a conversation about a book she hadn’t read.
She had meant to read Cry, the Beloved Country—honestly—but every time she picked up her copy and read There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills, Korey rode her bike off the end of the dock because she thought that if she pedaled fast enough she could skim across the water, or she set her brother’s hair on fire trying to see how close she could get a match before it caught, or she spent an entire weekend telling everyone who called that her mother couldn’t come to the phone because she was dead, which Patricia only learned about when people started showing up at the front door with condolence casseroles.
Before Patricia could discover why the road that runs from Ixopo was so lovely, she’d see Blue run past the sun porch windows buck naked, or she’d realize the house was so quiet because she’d left him at the downtown library and had to jump in the Volvo and fly back over the bridge, praying that he hadn’t been kidnapped by Moonies, or because he’d decided to see how many raisins he could fit up his nose (twenty-four). She never even learned where Ixopo was exactly because her mother-in-law, Miss Mary, moved in with them for a six-week visit and the garage room had to have clean towels, and the sheets on the guest bed had to be changed every day, and Miss Mary had trouble getting out of the tub so they had one of those bars installed and she had to find somebody to do that, and the children had laundry that needed to be done, and Carter had to have his shirts ironed, and Korey wanted new soccer cleats because everyone else had them but they really couldn’t afford them right now, and Blue was only eating white food so she had to make rice every night for supper, and the road to Ixopo ran on to the hills without her.
Joining the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant had seemed like a good idea at the time. Patricia realized she needed to get out of the house and meet new people the moment she leaned over at supper with Carter’s boss and tried to cut up his steak for him. A book club made sense because she liked reading, especially mysteries. Carter had suggested it was because she went through life as if the entire world were a mystery to her, and she didn’t disagree: Patricia Campbell and the Secret of Cooking Three Meals a Day, Seven Days a Week, without Losing Your Mind. Patricia Campbell and the Case of the Five-Year-Old Child Who Keeps Biting Other People. Patricia Campbell and the Mystery of Finding Enough Time to Read the Newspaper When You Have Two Children and a Mother-in-Law Living with You and Everyone Needs Their Clothes Washed, and to Be Fed, and the House Needs to Be Cleaned and Someone Has to Give the Dog His Heartworm Pills and You Should Probably Wash Your Own Hair Every Few Days or Your Daughter Is Going to Ask Why You Look Like a Street Person. A few discreet inquiries, and she’d been invited to the inaugural meeting of the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant at Marjorie Fretwell’s house.
The Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant picked their books for that year in a very democratic process: Marjorie Fretwell invited them to select eleven books from a list of thirteen she found appropriate. She asked if there were other books anyone wanted to recommend, but everyone understood that wasn’t a real question, except for Slick Paley, who seemed chronically unable to read social cues.
“I’d like to nominate Like Lambs to the Slaughter: Your Child and the Occult,” Slick said. “With that crystal store on Coleman Boulevard and Shirley MacLaine on the cover of Time magazine talking about her past lives, we need a wake-up call.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” Marjorie Fretwell said. “So I imagine it falls outside our mandate of reading the great books of the Western world. Anyone else?”
“But—” Slick protested.
“Anyone else?” Marjorie repeated.
They selected the books Marjorie wrote down for them, assigned each book to the month Marjorie thought best, and picked the discussants Marjorie thought were most appropriate. The discussant would open the meeting by delivering a twenty-minute presentation on the book, its background, and the life of its author, then lead the group discussion. A discussant could not cancel or trade books with anyone else without paying a stiff fine because the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant was not fooling around.
When it became clear she wasn’t going to be able to finish Cry, the Beloved Country, Patricia called Marjorie.
“Marjorie,” she said over the phone while putting a lid on the rice and turning it down from a boil. “It’s Patricia Campbell. I need to talk to you about Cry, the Beloved Country.”
“Such a powerful work,” Marjorie said.
“Of course,” Patricia said.
“I know you’ll do it justice,” Marjorie said.
“I’ll do my best,” Patricia said, realizing that this was the exact opposite of what she needed to say.
“And it’s so timely with the situation in South Africa right now,” Marjorie said.
A cold bolt of fear shot through Patricia: what was the situation in South Africa right now?
After she hung up, Patricia cursed herself for being a coward and a fool, and vowed to go to the library and look up Cry, the Beloved Country in the Directory of World Literature, but she had to do snacks for Korey’s soccer team, and the babysitter had mono, and Carter had a sudden trip to Columbia and she had to help him pack, and then a snake came out of the toilet in the garage room and she had to beat it to death with a rake, and Blue drank a bottle of Wite-Out and she had to take him to the doctor to see if he would die (he wouldn’t). She tried to look up Alan Paton, the author, in their World Book Encyclopedia but they were missing the P volume. She made a mental note that they needed new encyclopedias.
The doorbell rang.
“Mooooom,” Korey called from the downstairs hall. “Pizza’s here!”
She couldn’t put it off any longer. It was time to face Marjorie.
* * *
—
Marjorie had handouts.
“These are just a few articles about current events in South Africa, including the recent unpleasantness in Vanderbijlpark,” she said. “But I think Patricia will sum things up nicely for us in her discussion of Mr. Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country.”
Everyone turned to stare at Patricia sitting on Marjorie’s enormous pink-and-white sofa. Not being familiar with the design of Marjorie’s home, she had put on a floral dress and felt like all anyone saw were her head and hands floating in midair. She wished she could pull them into her dress and disappear completely. She felt her soul exit her body and hover up by the ceiling.
“But before she begins,” Marjorie said, and every head turned back her way, “let’s have a moment of silence for Mr. Alan Paton. His passing earlier this year has shaken the literary world as much as it’s shaken me.”
Patricia’s brain chased itself in circles: the author was dead? Recently? She hadn’t seen anything in the paper. What could she say? How had he died? Was he murdered? Torn apart by wild dogs? Heart attack?
“Amen,” Marjorie said. “Patricia?”
Patricia’s soul decided that it was no fool and ascended into the afterlife, leaving her at the
mercy of the women surrounding her. There was Grace Cavanaugh, who lived two doors down from Patricia but whom she’d only met once when Grace rang her doorbell and said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but you’ve lived here for six months and I need to know: is this the way you intend for your yard to look?”
Slick Paley blinked rapidly, her sharp foxy face and tiny eyes glued to Patricia, her pen poised above her notebook. Louise Gibbes cleared her throat. Cuffy Williams blew her nose slowly into a Kleenex. Sadie Funche leaned forward, nibbling on a cheese straw, eyes boring into Patricia. The only person not looking at Patricia was Kitty Scruggs, who eyed the bottle of wine in the center of the coffee table that no one had dared open.
“Well…,” Patricia began. “Didn’t we all love Cry, the Beloved Country?”
Sadie, Slick, and Cuffy nodded. Patricia glanced at her watch and saw that seven seconds had passed. She could run out the clock. She let the silence linger hoping someone would jump in and say something, but the long pause only prompted Marjorie to say, “Patricia?”
“It’s so sad that Alan Paton was cut down in the prime of his life before writing more novels like Cry, the Beloved Country,” Patricia said, feeling her way forward, word by word, guided by the nods of the other women. “Because this book has so many timely and relevant things to say to us now, especially after the terrible events in Vander…Vanderbill…South Africa.”
The nodding got stronger. Patricia felt her soul descending back into her body. She forged ahead.
“I wanted to tell you all about Alan Paton’s life,” she said. “And why he wrote this book, but all those facts don’t express how powerful this story is, how much it moved me, the great cry of outrage I felt when I read it. This is a book you read with your heart, not with your mind. Did anyone else feel that way?”
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