The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

In The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, Grady Hendrix explores the theme of ageism through three different characters: cleaning woman Francine, prim and proper Mrs. Savage, and Miss Mary, Patricia’s mother-in-law who, because of dementia, has changed from loving and intelligent grandparent and former teacher to a woman prone to unpredictable outbursts and incapable of taking care of herself. The elderly population of the novel have two options: be cared for but seen as a burden or be forgotten entirely. 

All of the elderly characters in the story are women; they are depicted as irritable, mean, and a nuisance. Francine is an old Black woman “with a face like a dried apple, and not many people hired her in the Old Village because she had a vinegary nature.” (69) Mrs. Savage, the second most prominent elderly character, has such a perfect house and lawn that she annoys her less together neighbors. She is bitter and full of complaints. The people of Mt. Pleasant have such little interest in their elderly population that when they disappear, it’s more a relief than concerning: The only character who notices that Francine disappears is another Black woman, Mrs. Greene; meanwhile, Mrs. Savage is so little observed that her neighbors readily accept the idea that she was a drug user.

The novel’s physical descriptions of the elderly are grotesque. Francine’s corpse is a decaying nightmare, Mrs. Savage’s animalistic movements are terrifying as she drinks the raccoon blood, and Miss Mary’s naked intrusion into the book club—her “sagging breasts, her slack, pendulous belly, and her sparse, gray public hair,” all of which make her look like “a cadaver washed up on the beach” (101)—is a source of shame for Patricia. All of this reflects repulsion towards aging bodies, which appear less and less human as the narrative progresses.

The elderly women feature heavily in the novel’s horror plot, their physical frailty serving both as a contrast to the grisly violence they suffer or inflict, and as a way for Patricia to locate empathy for them. Francine primarily exists to have a gruesome death. Only when Patricia discovers Francine’s “lonely corpse” haphazardly hacked to pieces to fit into a suitcase in James Harris’ attic (320), does she finally have sympathy for Francine as a fellow human being: the “wide-open eyes and exposed teeth […] made her sad. [Francine had] been alone up here for a long time” (301). Even then, however, Francine is a grotesque display rather than a person: Patricia shows Kitty the suitcase with Francine’s body as a piece of evidence, useful in getting Kitty to commit to getting rid of James.

After Mrs. Savage rabidly attacks Patricia, the novel uses the scene to remind readers that all of the novel’s women will someday grow old and potentially rejected. Patricia reflects on what her own aging might look like, and how her family will treat her:

One day, she would be the same age as Ann Savage and Miss Mary. Would Korey and Blue act like Carter’s brothers and ship her around like an unwanted fruitcake? Would they argue over who got stuck with her? If Carter died, would they sell the house, her books, her furniture, and split up the proceeds between themselves and she’d have nothing left of her own? (63).

The emphasis on being shipped around like an object is telling—Patricia suddenly realizes how dehumanizing her attitude toward Miss Mary is, and in turn, how she will suffer a similar fate.

Unlike Mrs. Savage and Francine, Miss Mary is a locus of horror that has nothing at first to do with the supernatural. Rather, the terror she induces in Blue comes from the unpredictability of her mental decline, which comes with violent outbursts. Once, she “doted on her grandchildren. Now, when Blue accidentally knocked over her buttermilk, she pinched his arm so hard it left a black-and-blue mark. She kicked Patricia in the shin after finding out there was no liver for her supper “(34). The novel’s vampire monster does not need to dehumanize Miss Mary: Her dementia is doing that instead. Though Miss Mary was once a brilliant and kind schoolteacher, mother, and grandmother who “had been able to draw a map of the United Sates from memory, known the entire periodic table by heart [...] Now she wore diapers and couldn’t follow a story about gardening in the Post and Courier” (60). After the incident with Mrs. Savage, Patricia projects her fear onto Miss Mary, imagining that she is only a few degrees away from “squatting in the side yard stuffing raw raccoon meat into her mouth” (63).

All hope for rehumanizing Miss Mary, however, is not lost, as a special bond grows between Patricia and Miss Mary whenever Miss Mary has moments of lucidity. The relationship grows when the ghost of Miss Mary as she used to be before dementia visits Patricia. Though in the novel, the ghost has exposition and information about James Harris, the symbolism is profound: Patricia reconnects with Miss Mary by remembering the woman she was, rather than the burden she grew to be.