★★★☆☆ Too intense for me

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

Grady Hendrix

** spoiler alert **

I began with the audiobook version of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, then halfway through switched to the kindle version. The audio version was too intense for me.

Now, the title contains the word "vampires", so you will naturally assume that TSBCGtSV is a horror novel. That assumption would be right. Then you probably assumed that when I said it was too intense for me, I meant it was too scary or icky. That assumption would be wrong. In fact, for my tastes the explicit horror portions -- the flood of rats, the vampirism, the blood and gore, were the light entertainment. The parts that were difficult for me were the human interactions.

In fact, the scene that made me say, "This is too much" occurs at almost exactly the halfway point. In it our hero, Patricia Campbell, is cruelly humiliated in front of her friends and their husbands by her own awful, awful husband Carter. It was like watching a stand-up comedian die on stage -- so painful, you feel humiliated yourself to watch it. This is neither the first not the last time Patricia is humiliated in the book, not to mention suffering other distressing emotions. So, I didn't want to continue listening, but I still wanted to finish the book.

A person reading silently typically reads 3-4 times faster than someone reading aloud. TSBCGtSV is 14 hours in audio format, thus probably about 4 hours to read on kindle. I figured getting through the difficult parts quicker would help. Also, I find that I can manage a certain detachment when reading that is not necessarily available when listening to a human voice. This worked. I read the remaining half in about two hours without incapacitating distress.

I want to stress that I am not complaining that Bahni Turpin is a bad narrator. In fact, if anything, my problem was that she was unbearably good.

I suspect my reactions were idiosyncratic and will not be shared by most readers. Indeed, a quick glance at other reviews confirms that.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

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