So I know I've been sort of flooding this blog with just book reviews, and not much of anything else. I promise to bring different content soon, cross my heart!
So now to the book review...
So I struggled between giving this book 3 or 4 stars and then just decided to go with
**3.5 stars**
First off, let's start by admiring the cover. It's minimal, but still very striking - I love it! Second, my favorite show of all time is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so this girl loves her vampires AND her slayers <3 I also liked that this book was placed in the south. I'm a fan of the The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris and the Trueblood TV series (which is based off these books) - so this ticked off a lot of boxes for me, and I was SUPER stoked to read it. I've also read a few of Grady Hendrix's books (My Best Friend's Exorcism and We Sold Our Souls) and enjoyed them.
So now, the story: The author definitely has a way of building a scene, especially when the scary and grotesque are involved. Some of the descriptions had my skin crawling. They were creepy, and the tension was high y'all!
The scary scenes were great, but now, the not-so-great. I get that this book is set in the South during the 80's and 90's, but that shouldn't had been an excuse to push the Black characters to the sidelines. And to add insult to injury, it seems like the evil vampire is also a racist one because he mainly murders Black people. One of the Black characters (I guess the only Black character really), Mrs. Greene, does manage to redeem the book towards the end when she joins the book club slayers and does most of the work of offing the vamp (and is probably the only likable character). She also seems to be the only mother in the book who cares about her children because she sends them away to somewhere safe. Not Patricia, who even though knows there's a vampire harming the children, doesn't bother to consider the safety of her own children. Even though her argument to her friends is always, "but the children?!" But I guess that doesn't include her own children [insert eye roll here]. Which leads me to the next annoyance, the characters: the bored housewives and their laboring husbands... None of them were appealing. I didn’t connect with any of the women, and all the husbands were just... ugh. Also, the connection between the women characters seemed so flighty. In my mind, I envisioned tough broads with some semblance of sisterhood and instead was given wishy-washy female support. I noticed that the author tends to write his books from a female perspective, which I appreciate. But it may have been the reason why I wasn't able to identify with any of the female characters because in hindsight, they were written from a male perspective. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not like he had the male characters on a pedestal (in fact, they were all pretty awful, way worse than the female characters). I just couldn't identify with any of these characters, and definitely wouldn't want any of these women as my friend in real life. I did find some great satisfaction with Patricia telling Carter she wanted a divorce (finally!!) - so good on Grady for that! Overall, I think I would have gave this book 5 stars if it was written from one of the supporting characters views, like Mrs. Greene. A White male vampire who is murdering Black children gets what's coming to him by a Black, hardworking, single mother and her friends - that just seems like a better story to tell.
Let's be friends on Goodreads! https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/83698274-christina-terriquez :)
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