Chloe's Not Scared

I got into slashers during 2020. I mean, really into them. Not just all the Chucky movies, but all the way down to Terror Train, Dolls, and Witchboard 2: The Devil’s Doorway. Going from a mindset of “I like horror but not gore” to a slash-a-thon was exactly the kind of progression I needed to escape the horrors of reality. It’s clear now that I wanted movies that were more visceral to work out my anxieties about the pandemic, which is pretty common. The other inspiration for a slash-a-thon was a horror writer named Grady Hendrix, an odd duck but a duck who I admire. Hendrix writes about strong female outsiders in perilous— often paranormal— situations. His books become very special during the pandemic not only due to the visceral nature of his slashers (his books are gross and I mean that in a good way), but his ability to stress the horror of isolation within society. 

If there’s one thing that Hendrix excels at, it’s world-building. In The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, one of Hendrix’s most successful novels (I will be focussed on it for the majority of this piece), Patricia Campbell belongs to a book club in 1990’s Charleston. The setting enhances the creep factor: you can almost feel the Spanish moss dripping off the trees. The book club’s reading selections (grisly true crime titles) are kept secret from their husbands. Because of this, we can assume that anything too “out there” will be looked down upon by their Southern society. In Horrorstör, Amy is employed by ORSK (a fictional imagining of IKEA) where her social group is primarily her coworkers. Amy feels like a loser, so she doesn’t like to engage with people at work, but nevertheless the employees are bound together by proximity (and the shared trauma of working together in a capitalistic society). Lynnette Tarkington in The Final Girls Support Group attends a group therapy comprised of other female survivors of extreme violence. The sessions are led in secret, in fear that the patients’ attackers will come back to finish them off. In all three books, these social groups act outside of the “norm” of their respective societies, making their betrayals much more fierce.

Objectively, in our real world context, accusing a neighbor of being a vampire is a good indication that the accuser is suffering from a mental health crisis. But in Southern Book Club’s…, James Harris is a vampire and Patricia is the only one who knows, besides the reader. Because of this, I felt for Patricia. She first attempts to convince the group that Harris deals drugs (192), but their support quickly falls away when the law enforcement refuses to investigate the claims. When Grace Cavanaugh, the “queen bee” of the group, feels socially humiliated by Patricia’s claims against Harris, the book club begins to ostracize Patricia. These forms of violence are traditionally “female”-coded forms and often played for laughs in fiction (the stereotype of mean girls, usually rich white women), but Hendrix writes the emotional abuse as dead serious. Patricia even attempts suicide and is admitted to a hospital due to the intense mental abuse she endures. After she wakes up, her husband issues an ultimatum: she either must stop accusing Harris or she loses her family (235). While the readers aren’t meant to empathize with Patricia’s husband or friends, the novel is set up to make the reader aware that the ideology that drives the group is seeped in Southern norms. For example, Patricia’s husband knows that if his wife is “deviant,” it is reflected on the entire family. Grace’s husband is abusive and straying from the social rules of Southern society may have serious consequences. Where the book club once existed outside of the ideological rules (reading Ann Rule instead of The Bible), they are now upholding Southern etiquette as a means of survival. 

This mechanism appears in Hendrix’s other books as well, though not as intensely or effectively as The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. The main characters in Hendrix’s books are intensely relatable, due to each novel touching on a basic human experience: feeling like an outsider within an ideological framework. Similarly in Horrorstör, Amy feels the burden of working in a capitalistic society, until a paranormal threat descends on her workplace. The goal then becomes to save the store, upholding the capitalist ideal that previously weighed her down. Lynnette in The Final Girls Support Group is already deemed as mentally unwell. She is not one of the strong badass women we usually associate with final girls. She is broken. When Lynnette starts to think that someone is chasing her and the other support group members. Due to the way the other members reacted (disbelief), I didn’t know how to interpret Lynette’s breakdown: is it reality or all in her head? The bottom line is that either way, it feels real to Lynette. It feels real for us. 

It isn’t simply feeling like an outsider or experiencing a loss, but rather the combination of both that makes Hendrix’s books unique, and also very scary. After being ostracized and gaslit by pandemic-deniers, I related to the loneliness that Patricia felt when her friends abandoned her. As an essential worker, I understood Amy’s desperation between choosing either removing herself from a situation that threatens her health and safety, and the need to make an income. Lynette had trouble differentiating her anxieties between real threats and those that were symptoms of PTSD or survivor’s guilt. After the pandemic, we can all say that we have been through trauma. The combination of a visceral slasher and the psychological effects on the mental health of a character that the reader is meant to relate to, makes Hendrix’s novels complex horror for our post-pandemic society. 

Sources

Hendrix, Grady. The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires: A Novel. Quirk Books, 2021.

Hendrix, Grady, and Michael Rogalski. Horrorstör: A Novel. Quirk Books, 2014.

Hendrix, Grady. The Final Girl Support Group. Penguin USA, 2021.