My first time reading a Grady Hendrix novel, I did not realize he was the same author who wrote My Best Friend’s Exorcism and The Final Girl Support Group – I imagine I will enjoy both of those novels as I quite liked this one. It gave me the same feeling as those first few seasons of True Blood, southern camp at its finest. Think Steel Magnolias, but with an added twist of body horror.
Set during the late 80s and early 90s in South Carolina, we’re introduced to Patricia Campbell; a suburban housewife and former nurse married to a psychiatrist husband who is never home (Carter), caring for a Alzheimer’s ridden mother in law (Miss Mary) and mom to two terrible children (daughter Korey and soon to be nazi sympathizer son Blue). Patricia’s one escape is her book club, which she religiously attends weekly. After failing to read her assigned material for the meeting she is leading, Cry the Beloved Country (which, girl, same), Patricia is recruited by some of the other housewives, Kitty, the mother of a brood, and Mary Ellen, the “Yankee”, to join in their book club where they will be reading less scholarly material, aka true crime stories. Rounding out the group are fellow defectors Slick, a mousey religious type, and Grace, the no nonsense Grace Kelly stand in of the group. The women form a deep bond as they read through works about Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and similar ilk.
All is well until one night, Patricia is attacked in her driveway by an elderly neighbor. The woman mauls off a piece of Patricia’s ear and is hospitalized with a strange illness, dying shortly after her admission into the hospital. Patricia is left permanently scarred and shaken by the deranged woman’s behavior. While trying to satiate her own conscious of the demise of this elderly neighbor, she encounters the woman’s nephew, James Harris. A well traveled yet sickly looking man who is basically allergic to sunlight, Patricia befriends James and quickly introduces him to her friends and family. It isn’t until strange new events begin taking place in their small southern town that Patricia begins to think there is something more insidious about James than she first realized.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It kept me hooked from beginning to end. For one, I wasn’t dealing with a sad sack female protagonist. While this one was in a loveless marriage and has ungrateful children who don’t respect her, she is the reason events in the book move forward and doesn’t stop giving into her mission to figure out what is happening in her small town and why children are disappearing without anyone raising alarm bells. Hendrix interweaves themes of racial discrimination, segregation, classism, prejudice, domestic/marital discourse, male ego and American idealism into this book, perfectly capturing the sheer vapid nature of the late 80s and early 90s in America where the materialistic side of this country really flew into full swing.