What scares you? Gory figures scuttling in the shadows? Cockroaches drilling in your ear? Losing your partner, your children, your sanity? That’s all here, and more, in Grady Hendrix’s Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires.

Patricia Campbell is an archetypical Southern housewife, both overwhelmed by her family’s demands and bored by her routine. Her guilty pleasure is meeting with her neighbors, also bored housewives, to discuss gruesome true crime books. Life in her well-manicured neighborhood turns sideways when she is attacked in her own yard. Everything spins out of control when she uncovers something horrifying about her new neighbor. Who can she turn to for help? Who are the real monsters?

If you’re looking for campy Southern belles sassing and staking their way through a cemetery, look elsewhere. Hendrix employs satire and a nostalgic nineties setting to ease the reader into a bleeding miasma of tribalism, racism, and vampire horror.