If I had a nickel for every book I’d read recently where I went into it not really knowing much more than the cover and title and suddenly horror novel, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the ’90s about a women’s book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a blood-sucking fiend.

Which probably should have clued me in.

It’s a fascinating story that starts out fairly tame. A southern woman settled into a life of housewife–a life of long days, unthanked by her family.

“Why do you pretend what we do is nothing?” she asked. “Every day, all the chaos and messiness of life happens and every day we clean it all up. Without us, they would just wallow in filth and disorder and nothing of any consequence would ever get done. Who taught you to sneer at that? I’ll tell you who. Someone who took their mother for granted.”

And to brighten her days…

Sometimes she craved a little danger. And that was why she had book club.

That is, until a strange man moves in next door. With a mysterious aversion to sunlight.

Uh huh.

At some point, the book really gets into that ‘runaway freight train’ feeling. There are some serious body horror scenes in this book and it gets increasingly dark. I mean, it started with biting an ear off, but it goes quite a bit further than that…

Yeah, definitely a horror novel.

Overall, I enjoyed it. The American South housewife theme isn’t something I read overly much and it it’s interesting counterpoint to the vampiric horror. They’re both great examples of ‘pretty and polite on the surface–and absolutely not underneath’.

Worth a read, I’d say.