Tag: Grady Hendrix

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Psycho Street: Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbors

This week’s column faces me with a happy predicament — how to write critically about a book I unequivocally loved? Some novels are puzzle boxes, devices of impossible intricacy meant to delight the intellect. Some take a different form — a raw, beating heart, oozing pathos and humanity. Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbors (Simon & Schuster) is both things, and more. It wrecked me, left me in tears twice, and if the past three days are any indication, Good Neighbors will live rent-free in my mind for a long time to come.

When the novel opens, the Wilde family has already worn out its welcome on suburban Maple Street. It isn’t anything they did, exactly. Sure, they could stand to take better care of their lawn, but it’s really about who they are.

Arlo Wilde, charting-musician-turned-office-supply-salesperson, with monster-movie-themed tattoos covering his track marks, likes to sit on the front porch and burn through packs of Parliaments. Gertie freezes up in social situations, leaving a big, fake smile on her face, a remnant from her beauty pageant days. She wears cheap jewelry, and her shirts are cut too low. Larry, their youngest, is going through a phase — he’s bright, but socially, he’s developing slowly. And poor Julia, pimply and pubescent, had to move to a new town at life’s most awkward stage, and now finds herself trying to fit in with a group of kids who’ve known each other since before they could speak.

As a family, the Wildes are damaged but brave, ever attempting to rise above hidden scars far more grisly than Arlo’s track marks.

David Zaugh, Zaugh Photography

Sarah Langan

When the novel begins, with a Fourth of July block party, Maple Street’s de facto leader Rhea Schroeder is on the outs with Gertie, ostensibly her best friend. In fact, both the Wilde women are feuding with the Schroeders, it seems, as there’s friction between Julia and Rhea’s daughter, Shelly. That drama is upstaged, though, when a sinkhole opens up in the park that borders the neighborhood. Ominous, hinting at hidden dangers, it spews candy-apple-scented fumes, a clear indication that something deadly lurks, hidden, under Maple Street.

Somehow, about a month after the novel’s beginning, the resentment bubbling under the surface of Maple Street overflows and leads to a series of murders. Good Neighbors makes no bones about that — each page takes the reader inexorably closer to catastrophe.

Langan could teach a master class in suspense. She peppers the plot with interstitial chapters taken from “real-life” newspaper clippings, articles, and Hollywood Babylon-style books about the infamous Maple Street Murders. As a result, every plot point feels tragically inevitable.

“There’s this thing that happens to people who’ve grown up with violence. It changes their hardwiring,” Langan writes. “They don’t react to threats like regular civilians. They do extremes. They’re too docile over small things but they go apeshit over the big stuff. In other words, they’re prone to violence.”

Langan lays out her pieces with a watchmaker’s precision, setting up the circumstances that lead to the Maple Street Murders. What’s terrifying is how common those circumstances turn out to be. In Good Neighbors, they’re newish neighbors who don’t quite fit in, a sinkhole, an oppressive and record-breaking heatwave, a tanked economy (glimpsed in the margins), a worsening environmental crisis, and a family with secrets. It’s generational trauma and PTSD and a community, a microcosm of America, struggling under the weight of these intersectional crises.

In other words, it could happen here, too.
Novel at Home: Sarah Langan with Grady Hendrix, authors in conversation in live online launch party for Good Neighbors, Tuesday, February 2nd, at 6 p.m. Event is free with registration.

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Southern Book Club’s Guide Is More Than Guts, Gore, and Vampire Lore

Forgetting that stretch of time when Twilight and True Blood were in their heyday and vampire-themed anything sold faster than blood punch at a monster mash, there can be no better time to release a vampire novel than during a pandemic.

Vampires, in lore, have deep roots in plague. It’s no surprise that garlic, which boosts the immune system and can help cover the smell of sickness, wards off night-walking, bloodsucking fiends. And that whole blood thing, well, bodily fluids are certainly a vector for spreading disease. Which brings us to vampires’ oft-documented predilection for uninhibited sex with multiple partners, yet another way to spread disease.

So, after a manner of speaking, Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (Quirk Books) could hardly be better timed. Though, maybe the New York-based, South Carolina-born author would have preferred his novel to come out at a time when book clubs could actually meet.

Grady Hendrix

Every vampire novel worth its holy water must pay homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the brilliant epistolary novel that condensed the span of bloodsucker folklore into one tome. Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires does just that, while simultaneously making a case for itself as something notable in the horror genre.

Set in a nice neighborhood in a South Carolina suburb in the ’90s, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires isn’t a typical tale of Transylvanian terror. Hendrix’s protagonist is Patricia Campbell, a youngish housewife whose hardworking psychiatrist husband is logging extra hours at work in an attempt to climb the ladder. Her kids are beginning to enter difficult ages, and her mother-in-law lives with them. Her care falls mainly to Patricia, at least until Patricia hires a part-time caretaker, Mrs. Greene. Patricia’s world is focused largely on her family and her community. She’s got a mile-long to-do list and very little in the way of diversion. Except her book club.

They meet once a month to discuss grisly paperback true crime accounts. It’s a rare source of excitement for Patricia, who carries her family and is, for the most part, taken for granted by them. Then James Harris moves to town, and everything gets really interesting, really quickly.

Grady Hendrix

Hendrix’s new novel underlines the disenfranchised in society by giving them first contact with the Old Village’s vampire — and then making sure no one with any power believes their warnings. James Harris takes his victims primarily from the low-income, majority-African-American part of town, and every year, when a young black child disappears, it’s chalked up to parental neglect or drugs and then shrugged off by most of the town’s blissfully ignorant inhabitants.

Hendrix, author of My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Horrorstör, has a firm grasp on — and he deftly exploits — the narrow band of believable reality that most adults inhabit. When Miss Mary “mistakes” James Harris for Hoyte Pickens, it’s attributed to a lapse in an old woman’s memory. Similarly, the kids couldn’t have seen a man on the roof; they imagined it, spurred on by the wind, nightmares, a copy of Salem’s Lot open on the nightstand.

The best example of this, though, is the book club itself. When Patricia and her fellow members, housewives all, suggest that there may be something strange about the stranger in town, their concerns are waved off as the imaginings of flighty women, the result of a mixture of boredom and the lurid books they read. There is some genius in Hendrix’s setting in this. The novel takes place between the women’s lib movement and #MeToo, between the civil rights struggle and the era of Black Lives Matter. And so much inequality in the novel is glossed over by a combination of manners, mind-your-business mentality, and a studied refusal to acknowledge obvious problems. Most of the people in the novel believe that inequality has been erased; they know society works for everyone because it works for them. It’s an excellent setup for a horror novel, where the ability to see past the status quo can mean the difference between life and death.

But Patricia is a little unconventional. She’s as guilty as the next Old Villager of taking her privileges for granted, but she’s willing to challenge herself and she’s got heart. “A woman had died. She needed to take something by the house. Grace was right: it made no sense, but sometimes you did a thing because that was just what you did, not because it was sensible.”

Hendrix excels at producing horror novels with a surfeit of humor and heart. That’s not to say there’s not plenty of creepiness in the pages of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, but there’s more to the novel than guts and gore and vampire lore. Hendrix’ new novel is sharp, clever and creepy in just the right ratio. All in all, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is a delicious morsel for any fan of the genre to sink their fangs into.

More information about The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires at gradyhendrix.com.
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Grady Hendrix’ We Sold Our Souls

Grady Hendrix, the author of Horrorstör and My Best Friend’s Exorcism, is an animated speaker. It’s easy to picture him sitting near an open window in his home in New York, leaning forward as he tells me over the phone about the guitar lessons, the solo speaking engagements, and the rewrites that went into his newest novel, We Sold Our Souls (Quirk Books).

The supernatural thriller tells the story of washed-up metal band Dürt Würk from the point of view of lead guitarist Kris Pulaski. After two albums recorded on a shoestring budget and countless cross-country tours measurable only in gallons of gas burned and number of bottles smashed onstage, Dürt Würk crafts their magnum opus, a concept album called Troglodyte. Then, when Terry Hunt, the band’s vocalist, gets them kicked off a tour, he decides to bury Troglodyte deep in the vault, and he convinces the band to sign over their rights to the band and its albums, to unknowingly sell their souls.

Grady Hendrix

“In a modern-day context, what’s selling your soul?” Hendrix asks. “With the medieval idea, you sold it to Satan. That’s conspiracy theories now. It’s this idea that there’s a secret 1 percent who control the world, and if you get in league with them, they will overcome all obstacles and you’ll be successful, not because you’ve earned it, but because you paid some price to join this cabal.”

Hendrix spent time with the conspiracy community, which, he says, can feel as if “you were beaten by the secret forces that run this world before you got out of bed, before you were even born.” But Hendrix had the antidote to defeatism right in front of him: “Bands are the most hopeful thing in the world. Nine out of 10 bands know they’re never going to make it big, but they’re up there on these stages throwing messages in bottles out into the ocean. And they will never see the beaches those bottles wash up on.”

Troglodyte is that message in a bottle. It’s a key for deciphering the novel and the only weapon at Kris’ disposal. “A lot of times, we rescue ourselves from terrible situations, we just don’t realize it. You’re in the past firing a bullet into the future that saves you and kills the monster. I wanted Troglodyte to be that,” Hendrix says. “Kris, when she was really connected to what she was doing and just doing it for the love of it, she tapped into whatever this is — the collective unconscious, Black Iron Mountain — and encoded this message to herself in the future.”

The novel plays out as a dark riff on the reunion tour trope. More than a decade after Terry dissolved Dürt Würk and shelved Troglodyte, Kris tries to reunite her old band and to understand the importance of the album they never released — and of Black Iron Mountain, the shadowy force haunting the pages of the book, dogging Kris as she hurtles toward a reunion.

“The supernatural gives you a chance to literalize things that are hard to define but that are feelings everyone has,” Hendrix says. “Black Iron Mountain isn’t real, but as a metaphor, there are these forces that are bigger than we are and older than we are. They want us to not be weird and just be ashamed of ourselves, and I think it’s hard to resist them.”

Hendrix talks about social media influencers and branding in the entertainment industry, saying “you have to flatten yourself. You have to get rid of all the weird stuff, all the contradictory stuff that makes us people.” He thinks the pendulum is swinging the other way, though, that people crave authenticity.

Hendrix says his previous novel got the best response when he “cut closest to the bone” and was honest about his most embarrassing moments, which inspired him when writing We Sold Our Souls. “There is this emphasis on cool, but I prefer enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is hot. Sometimes it makes you get carried away and forget the social niceties, and you can look a little nuts. But cool is removed and remote. Life is hot; corpses are cool.”

We Sold Our Souls is a redemption song in a minor key. The reader can’t help but hope Kris can pull off one last tour, a final road trip to salvation. Hendrix conjures the anguish of betrayal and the frustration of powerlessness in this novel about what passion is worth and how long to keep fighting to keep it alive in a world of pragmatic cool.

More information about We Sold Our Souls at www.gradyhendrix.com.