Casey 👑🗡️🥀

This was my first Grady Hendrix novel, selected by one of my book clubs, and I can't say I enjoyed it.

I thought it started strong with the prologue promising the female characters in the book to be more than they appear on the surface, but unfortunately the author doesn't deliver on that, nor on the claim in the Author's Note that this is meant to be a book pitting "Dracula against his [Hendrix's] mom". The "housewives" in this book barely pass as friends, they can hardly be described as badass or having much agency, and in the end they leave the real work of disposing of the monster to the one black woman who has been cleaning up after them and caring for their family members already for the duration of the story.

If you want to dismiss the racial dynamics in the story because of the time and place setting, fine. However, the role he places and leaves Mrs. Greene in might speak to those views extending beyond a storytelling component for the author. This, combined with the main character's son having a rampant Nazi obsession, left a strange aftertaste for me personally.

Finally, the horror just fell flat. That wasn't a vampire. He wasn't even a particularly skilled manipulator, this community was just incredibly willing to believe a white man with money. If you have to resort to rape as a plot element (followed by a derogatory description of the victim's naked body) to make your monster monstrous, at the very least you could properly kill him in the end.