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I liked the writing of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires very much except for the extreme, over the top, way too much (for me) gory and gross passages describing, in too much detail, rats, roaches (the worst!), spiders, blood sucking, like I never imagined it, horribleness. Picture a small, well to do community where no one locks their doors, the kids are safe playing outside until dark or even after dark, the men earn the income, and their high achieving housewives iron socks and sheets and vacuum curtains and keep the china and the silver cleaned and polished. The men also have their, not to be discussed, extracurricular activities while the women are bored out of their gourds, almost wishing for a murder or kidnapping or something interesting to happen. 

Several of these women have a little book club where they alternate real life true crime (the higher the body count the better) and thriller fiction that can only hope to match the real life crime stories. So when Patricia begins to suspect something very wrong about a handsome newcomer to their community, her husband, his friends and even her book club members think that it's her imagination running wild, after all the real and fictional crimes she has been reading about with the book club. But, Patricia is really on to something with her suspicions about this newcomer. He IS a thing of fiction, come to life, and he is consuming and preying on the young and old of the area, with no one but Patricia thinking he is anything but a financial savior for their little community. 

I'm giving this book 4 stars because, overall, I enjoyed it that much. But I had a really hard time with the detail of the descriptions of some of the really bad things happening in the book. One of the worst, for me, involved a roach and an ear but there is so much more gruesomeness going on in this book. And it is all described in the most vivid detail. I had to read this book as an over the top comedy horror story to handle how we could go from a Fried Green Tomatoes kind of vibe to something very dark and dirty, so quickly. Even during and after a huge bloody fight scene, the story is so very campy and I think the campiness is what allowed me to handle everything that is thrown at us in this book.

I want to add something to this review. Animals and people alike come to harm in this story because it's a vampire story. But I love a very touching scene in this book and for all my griping about gruesome, this book has the sweetest treatment of an old dog. It's very special and it meant a lot to me and that treatment has made me a big fan of this author.

Published April 7, 2020

Thank you to Quirk Books/Random House and Edelweiss for this ARC.