The New York Times Best Seller #1 April LibraryReads Pick April Indie Next Pick Goodreads Big Book of Spring Steel Magnolias meets Dracula in this '90s-set horror novel about a women's book club that must do battle with a mysterious newcomer to ...

This discussion really descended into a pretty divisive argument, so I'll keep in brief. On one side, the majority of NUBClub thought Hendrix's novel about southern mothers dealing with a vampire in their town a pretty good read: decently but not greatly written, plotted well, and with very believable characters. As a horror story, it had some good horror parts and was overall well-paced and a fun read. In particular, we thought the novel was pretty deft with issues of race and particularly gender. The other side hated the novel, because they felt the novel's introduction set up a work that praised the strength of mothers and then showed us racist and weak characters who did nothing heroic at all. A lot of this hinged on the fact that the vampire in the town, who was pretending to be a friend to the White townspeople, was systematically hunting Black youth from a poorer part of the city. The book's haters thought this was a cheap gesture; the book said explicit about the racism in the town, and thus was just using the Black characters to get cheap identity points. The majority of us vociferously disagreed. We pointed out that the Black characters actually call out the protagonists for not caring about Black lives, and we observed that we recognized the racist attitudes of the town BECAUSE Hendrix rendered them so well. We didn't feel like we needed explicit statements about race when we all walk away recognizing the racism. That said, Melanie and others argued convincing that the novel was really about misogyny -- the way that the core women were oppressed literally by the vampire and more pervasively and more quietly by their husbands. Most of us felt that Hendrix was showing us flawed women who when pushed to the limit and clearly too late, take action to save their town. It's a condemnation of small town tribalism and misogyny wrapped in a poppy dark horror genre. Your mileage may vary here though, depending on how you feel treatments of race need to be handled.