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The whole first half was cool, women supporting women and southern housewives teaming up to investigate their supernatural neighbour to protect their kids, and then it all fell apart.

I don’t think the time skip worked well narrative wise, it was only 3 years but it took all the build up and urgency and said let’s start again. It also seemed to wipe most of the personality away from the women, who didn’t really have a lot of redeeming qualities to begin with. Every man in this was atrocious, apart from maybe one of the husbands.

This is the second book I’ve read by Grady Hendrix and his style is very readable but my god does he fixate on weird specific details, like the cockroach scene was absolutely horrendous for no reason and so graphic. But my two main gripes with this book were as follows, and please be aware of spoilers and TWs below for child abuse/sexual assault):

Number 1 - the racist, sexist attitude towards characters. Any non white characters only appeared when they needed an ‘outside� influence to move the story forward and the depiction of these characters almost became a caricature at times. And the wives were all vapid, cleaning crazed bores who literally didn’t care that children were dying.

Number 2 - the vampire.
Look I get wanting to make such a well known creature different, but why reinvent the wheel to have a tentacle creature living in its throat? And why were the pedo vibes so strong? Was there any need for a 400yr old vampire being naked writhing around biting/sucking the inner thigh of literal children? The experience of being bitten by the vampire was said to basically be akin to the best orgasm of your life too�.. again why children? There was also no lore/explanation on how he came to be a vampire.

Also the rape scene where his black ichor semen was gushing out of that poor woman and hospitalised her. What the actual f***?

Overall, I guess if the above sounds good to you then give it a read, I don’t think I’ll be returning to Mount Pleasant again anytime soon.