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After reading The Final Girl and liking but not loving it, I kept hearing that this book was a favorite among Hendrix's fans.



And it has a lot of things in it that should have made it a real hit for me.
First of all, it's set in my neck of the woods in South Carolina. And it's always cool to recognize the settings, right? Plus, he's writing about a group of Southern women who are homemakers.
Yeah, that rings a bell. I did the stay-at-home mom thing for a couple of decades, so there's another thing we have in common.
And you say these chicks are going to form a book club and take out a vampire?
Sign me up.



But thing was, the first half of the book was boring to me. You get to know these stereotypical southern belles and learn about their lives. And the whole time I'm just wondering when we get to stake a vampire.
Move it along a bit, sugar.



I loved that Hendrix said he didn't appreciate what all his mother did for him until he got older and understood how much she sacrificed. That's so sweet. I mean that.
But I didn't like Patricia.
I just couldn't empathize with this character. I'm not that parent.
There's absolutely no way in hell I'd let my kids talk to me the way her kids did. What the fuck was wrong with her? You're not stoically protecting your children by letting them berate you when you feel bad, you're raising entitled monsters and setting them loose on the world.
Seriously. Just because I love my kids more than air doesn't mean I'm not going to tell them to piss right off if they start to think I'm some sort of emotional punching bag.
So while I was annoyed with her ungrateful children, I was more annoyed with her for raising ungrateful children.



Then there's Mrs. Greene. She's the lady who helps out with Patricia's senile mother-in-law and eventually ends up working for the cleaning company the vampire dude hires. She's also the only woman in the entire book who knows what's going on.
So why the hell does she need the help of these rich chicks to do something?
I mean, this vampire starts out by targeting her neighborhood. And it doesn't make the news because who cares that little black kids are dying, right? But Mrs. Greene sends her sons away because she knows something evil is killing these kids. And yet, when she finds out who he is, she does nothing.
Then she actually berates Patricia for doing nothing to help her.



As though she actually NEEDS these uppity-ass bitches to step in and save her?
And maybe it's because I can identify with Mrs. Greene a lot easier than I can with Patricia and her friends, but I just didn't see why she kept saying that Patricia failed her. Because of course someone like Patricia would fail her. Patricia was weak as hell. All of those women were.
They were too concerned with appearances to get shit done.
Now, I do understand how thankless a job it can be when your title is homemaker.
Thing is, I did it poor.



Patricia and her pals weren't worried about how to pay for a yearbook or a present for a birthday party that their kids were invited to. They were worried about upsetting their husbands or adhering to a silly set of rules of propriety that most of us aren't boujee enough to even be aware of, much less feel the need to follow.
So. Between their grating personalities, their terrible parenting skills, and their lack of any problems that I could relate to, I just couldn't muster a whole lot of fucks for any of them.



At the end of the day, Mrs. Greene was the only one I kind of liked, and I would honestly have rather heard this entire story from her point of view.
Except for the part where she waited around blaming Patty and friends for not stepping up faster. It just didn't ring true to me that someone like her would have even thought to lean on a group of ladies who were made out of paper mache. It seems as though this whole vampire situation could have been taken care of years and years beforehand if she'd gotten a couple of her friends together and gone after him.



But.
I get that Hendrix was trying to show off the Steel Magnolia thing that everyone loves. And yes, there are most definitely those women out there.
These women are not those women.
Because if you have to be dragged out of your comfortable house kicking, screaming, and crying to help save the day?
Well, all I can say is