Tag: Horror

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires

I thought that when I finished Where the Crawdads Sing I had used up my excellent book karma for the entire year. Oh boy was I wrong. Grady Hendrix has spun a yarn here that is so vibrant and arresting that by the end I actually had to go lie down to slow my speeding heartbeat.

I felt so many emotions. Horror and fear of course, but anger at how badly the women of the group are treated by their husbands. The eighties and nineties really suffered from a 1950s hangover in terms of how wives and housewives were treated (although I would argue that married women/mothers are still not treated well or equitably, but this book takes place in the eighties and nineties so that’s the context for now).

I was heartened by how the women supported each other. Whether it was childcare, cleaning, elder care, carpools, you name it and the women were a closely knit team who had each other’s backs.

Hendrix wove racial differences between communities into the story seamlessly. Mrs. Greene, the black housekeeper that the MC hires to take care of her elderly mother-in-law that comes to live with them full time, brings the vampire activity to the women’s attention showing them how the black children were falling prey to him and because they were from the black community it never made the papers and anyone outside the black neighborhood didn’t notice.

First the vampire came for the black children, and the women tried to do something but were thwarted by the men, and so Mrs. Greene was left out to dry, her beliefs about white people reaffirmed.

You will hate most of the men by the end of this, but it will be a hatred of their own making. Everything they do is 100% realistic and you’ll recognize all of them. You’ll be frustrated that the women threaten to break apart because they feel a stronger allegiance to their husbands than to each other. All you will want is for the women to forget about their husbands and get together to destroy this leech and keep everyone safe. I found myself continually returning to the rallying cry of today: Believe the women!!! If only the men had believed them from the start, but then we wouldn’t have been given the entirety of this amazing book.

This is an amazing, original take on the vampire story. If you have the time you will read it in one sitting. I was disappointed when I had to put it down to go to sleep or do other things. If you can stomach a little gore and horror, this is a tale that illuminates so much more than good versus evil and you will want to read it. Go get you some immediately!

Invasive (Zer0es #2)

Invasive

This book showed up on a number of top science fiction lists, and so I requested it from the library. It is my first Chuck Wendig novel, and I feel bad because I did not realize that Invasive was #2 in his Zer0es series. To be honest it stands on its own well, and you don’t have to read the first book to enjoy the second (although the beginning of this book does spoil the first one, so if you’re a purist you might want to read the first book Zer0es first).

The plot is this: someone made a hybrid ant a la Jurassic Park that eats Candida (yeast) on people, basically skinning them alive, and Hannah Stander is an FBI consultant that is called in to research and discover who is behind their creation and distribution. Her search takes her to the secluded island of Kolohe, part of the Hawaiian islands, and she is caught on island when the culprit decides to release the ants and escape with more colonies, supposedly to bring about an ant apocalypse (think when Nedry steals the embryos and tries to escape but dies and the power on the entire island shuts down, and chaos ensues – it’s really similar to that but with more bodies).

This story is not character driven. The characters could be named with letters of the alphabet and this story would still be compelling. I kept reading because what was happening was horrifying and I had to know how it would all end. There were some points toward the end where I thought it might end with the ants actually taking over and destroying everything. I won’t spoil what actually happens; maybe they do take over and destroy everything. Ants are terrible creatures.

If you like mystery, thrillers, or science fiction, you should definitely give Invasive a go. It’s a quick read by virtue of its fantastic story – you won’t want to stop until you’re done. Go get you some.