History Literature / TheSouthernBookClubsGuideToSlayingVampires

The book takes place in TheNineties and follows Patricia, a doctor's wife and dissatisfied stay-at-home mom in Charlestown. She and a few of her neighbors grow bored of the existing book club in town which focusses exclusively on high-brow literature and form a new one focussed on TrueCrime content. Later, she is attacked one night by the old woman who lives down the street and gets her ear bitten off.

** The books the women read include ''Literature/TheStrangerBesideMe'' and they talk about Ted Bundy a lot.

* GenreSavvy:
** James himself says that all he had to do was be a polite Caucasian man with some money to throw around in order to ingratiate himself to the people of the Old Village.
** Patricia also knows better than to tell everyone that James is a vampire, and instead comes up with the much more believable accusation that he's a drug dealer.

* MissingWhiteWomanSyndrome: James Harris mostly targets black children in the poor Six Mile neighborhood because he knows that the authorities won't care.

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler:Slick died after being raped, Six Mile was economically ruined, all of the Book Club families went broke due to the real estate collapse, and James is still alive... kind of. However, on the bright side, he can't reach any more children, the book club are keeping a watchful eye on his remains, Korey and Blue recuperate from James grooming them, and, when Carter tries to manipulate Blue and Korey ''again'' to hurt Patricia, they in fact turn on him and tell them they want to live with Patricia.]]

* BrattyTeenageDaughter: Korey. She is constantly rude to Patricia and refers to Patricia as stupid even before James enters the neighborhood.

* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: James's blood-draining of young kids (including [[spoiler:Patricia's daughter Korey]]) is full of thinly veiled references to sexual abuse; he even literally sucks from their inner thigh on top of grooming his victims (usually from poor, deprived areas).
* DomesticAbuse: All of the women have to deal with some share of this. Patricia's husband basically puts her in a psychiatric ward and lets her children see her in such condition. Grace's husband beats her after finding out about the Club's suspicions. Slick just gets yelled at and has her subservient position to her husband reinforced by him quoting the bible.

* FatSweatySouthernerInAWhiteSuit: Mr. Harris is pretty fit but her does not like the sun at all. Further once money starts flooding into six mile from the housing development a lot of people start adopting this style which doesn't suit them.
* GenerationXerox: Miss Mary's recognizes James because when she was a child she saw James when he went by Hoyt Pickens. Hoyt got her father involved in a scheme to secretly brew booze during the prohibition era, and it made them prosperous for a time. Hoyt then blamed the mysterious deaths of children in the area [[spoiler: on an innocent black man, whom they murdered and then buried in Miss Mary's backyard.]] Two generations later, he returns to the area [[spoiler: and gets away with killing children for years because he mostly focuses on children from low income African American households. Miss Mary's son gets involved in his new moneymaking scheme, which involves forcing more poor African American families out of their homes, and when James vanishes again, Carter also is financially devastated by the event.]]

* LaserGuidedKarma: The Book Club finally deliver this to James at the end of the book after him getting away with murdering at least one person a year for literal centuries. At the same time, [[spoiler: the husbands, all of whom took James's side and stopped their wives from bringing him to justice, are financially devastated by getting involved in his housing development.]]

* {{Mammy}}: Mrs Green is one and it's one of the most [[BrokenBase polarizing]] elements of the story. Is she a deconstruction because she's supposed to show how out of touch the wealthy white women are from Mrs Green's deprived "ghetto" life, or is she actually a reconstruction because she still forgives them and shows the mammy's caring for upper-class white society along with her extreme competence?
* ObnoxiousInLaws: Patricia's brothers-in-law and her husband were supposed to take turns watching the senile Miss Mary, but when Caleb takes the first visit, they refuse to take her meaning Patricia has to take care of her full time, and her senility makes her very rude and difficult to deal with. [[spoiler: Later subverted with Miss Mary, who gives Patricia a warning from beyond the grave and watches over her after they finally defeat James.]]
* OurGhostsAreDifferent: [[spoiler:Miss Mary returns as an apparition several times to thwart James, once to place [[ConvenientPhotograph evidence]] in Mrs. Green's hand for safe keeping another to keep get Patricia out of her drug fueled funk and to start acting again]].
* OurVampiresAreDifferent: [[spoiler: While there are supernatural elements in the book James Harris comes across more of a biological oddity. He has sensitive eyes but they don't stop him going out into the day light if he uses sunglasses. A proboscis hidden in his throat let's him use another's body to "filter" his blood, the process being both pleasurable and addictive for the host. The conversation process requires sexual contact which causes a medical condition compared to a autoimmune condition or AIDS and the victim grows a proboscis of their own. Despite all this he is still supernatural given that he's still alive after getting dismembered.]]
* RapeIsASpecialKindOfEvil: [[spoiler:James is ''evil'' and needs to be destroyed literal years prior to this, but the impetus for all the women to get together and agree to kill him is that he raped Slick and caused her death.]]
* SealedEvilInASixPack: [[spoiler:After dismembering James Harris, the women do this to him, splitting up the parts and sinking some in the ocean and putting the rest in Grace's crypt.]]

* SouthernGothicSatan: James Harris is a corrupting presence in Six Mile but all he does he does by taking advantage of long standing issues there, the authorities ignoring the black community, the husband's misogyny and greed, communities obsession with keeping up appearances.
** James Harris shares his name with a RecurringCharacter from much of Creator/ShirleyJackson excellent horror fiction, who goes back all the way to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daemon_Lover Ballad of the Deamon Lover]].

* StepfordSuburbia: The entire neighborhood is one of these, smiles and spousal abuse.

* SpiritualSuccessor: To another of Hendrix's novels, ''Literature/MyBestFriendsExorcism''. Both are set in Charlestown in relatively recent historical periods (the 1980s in the case of the latter, and the 1990s for this one), cover years, and show female friendship facing off against an otherworldly evil [[spoiler:that is ultimately defeated through perseverance.]]

* DomesticAbuse: All of the women have to deal with some share of this. Patricia's husband basically puts her in a psychiatric ward and lets her children see her in such condition. Gail's husband beats her after finding out about the Club's suspicions. Slick just gets yelled at and has her subservient position to her husband reinforced by him quoting the bible.

* GenerationXerox: Miss Mary's recognizes James because when she was a child she saw James when he went by Hoyt Pickens. Hoyt got her father involved in a scheme to secretly brew booze during the prohibition era, and it made them prosperous for a time. Hoyt then blamed the mysterious deaths of children in the area [[spoiler: on an innocent black man, whom they murdered and then buried in Miss Mary's backyard.]] Two generations later, he returns to the area [[spoiler: and gets away with killing children for years because he mostly focuses on children from low income African American households. Miss Mary's son gets involved in his new moneymaking scheme, which involves forcing more poor African American families out of their homes, and when James vanishes again, Caleb also is financially devastated by the event.]]