Grady Hendrix grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and three of his novels are set there: My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016), The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (2020) and How to Sell a Haunted House (2023). Together they are the most widely read horror fiction ever set in the Lowcountry, and they are funnier, sadder and more local than most readers expect. This is a guide to the three books, the real places behind them, and what they have to do with the stories upriver.
Who is Grady Hendrix?
Hendrix was born in 1972 and raised in Charleston. He lives in New York now, but he comes home often, and his Charleston books are written with the specific, slightly embarrassed affection of someone describing the town that made him. Before fiction he worked as a journalist and film critic, and he co-wrote Paperbacks from Hell (2017), the definitive history of the lurid horror paperback boom of the 1970s and 80s. That book is the key to his novels: he writes the pulp horror he grew up reading, but with the people in it taken seriously.
His other novels, Horrorstör, We Sold Our Souls, The Final Girl Support Group and How to Sell a Haunted House‘s successor Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, are set elsewhere. The three below are the Charleston ones, and Hendrix has said the third may be the last, since the city he’s writing about is changing faster than he can keep up with.
1. My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016)
Charleston, 1988. Abby and Gretchen have been best friends since fourth grade at a private school that is recognizably one of the city’s own. After a night in the woods that goes wrong, Gretchen begins to change, and Abby comes to believe she’s possessed. The book is a horror novel about a demon and a much better novel about what it means to be sixteen and watch your best friend turn into someone you don’t know. Every chapter is named for an 80s song, the private-school satire is precise, and the ending lands harder than a book with a bodybuilding exorcist has any right to.
Lowcountry detail: the possession takes hold in the dark along the marsh and the old plantation-country roads outside the city. It’s the first sign of what Hendrix does with the landscape: Charleston’s horror lives at the edges, where the suburbs run out and the water begins.
2. The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (2020)
Where is The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires set?
In the Old Village of Mount Pleasant, across the Cooper River from Charleston, in the 1990s. Patricia Campbell is a housewife whose book club has drifted from literary fiction to true crime when a charming stranger named James Harris moves in down the street. Children in a nearby Black neighborhood begin to disappear. Patricia is the only one who connects it to the new neighbor, and nobody, least of all her husband, is inclined to believe a woman who reads too many paperbacks.
This is Hendrix’s best book and the one most people start with. The vampire is real, but the real horror is the way the women’s husbands dismiss them, and the way the Old Village’s comfortable families decide that what happens a few miles away isn’t their problem. The book club’s name for itself is a joke; the book’s argument, that the people who read horror are the ones who recognize it when it moves in, is not.
Lowcountry detail: the Old Village is a real neighborhood of live oaks and harbor-front houses, and the Black community in the book stands in for the real Mount Pleasant settlement communities, descended from freedpeople, that the town’s growth has been pressing on for decades. Hendrix doesn’t name them, but anyone from here knows the geography.
3. How to Sell a Haunted House (2023)
Mount Pleasant again, in the present. Louise Joyner, a single mother who left for San Francisco, and her brother Mark, who stayed in Charleston and never quite started anything, are forced back together when their parents die suddenly in a car accident. They have to clear out the family house. The house has other ideas, and most of them involve a hand puppet named Pupkin that their mother made and that will not stay in the attic.
Hendrix has said the book came out of cleaning out a dead friend’s house and watching his own mother’s health scares during the pandemic, and it reads that way: the puppet is the pulp hook, but the book is about the five stages of grief and what you do with a garage full of a dead person’s keepsakes. It’s the closest thing to a Southern Gothic novel he’s written, because the haunting is the family’s own past, and the house is the family’s own history, and nobody can sell either one.
Is Grady Hendrix Southern Gothic?
Mostly no, and he’d probably say so himself. Hendrix writes horror comedy with a pulp paperback’s pacing and a real monster at the center. Southern Gothic, as we lay out in What Is Southern Gothic?, usually withholds the monster and leaves the ghost unexplained. Hendrix shows you the vampire.
But the bones underneath are Gothic, and especially Lowcountry Gothic: the comfortable town that won’t look at what’s happening at its edges, the family house that has to be dealt with, the past that keeps turning up in the attic. And he does one thing the founding Southern Gothic writers rarely managed, which is to make the reader laugh out loud in the same chapter that frightens them. If you want the genre’s full range, you need him on the shelf next to O’Connor, not instead of her.
Reading order
The three books are standalones and share no characters. If you want one, read The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. If you want them in the order Charleston changes, read them as published: 1988, the 1990s, now. The last line of that sequence, with Hendrix saying he may be done with the city because of what the flood maps show, is its own kind of Lowcountry horror.
If you came here for Hendrix
His Charleston is the harbor and the Old Village. Ours is forty miles upriver, where the suburbs stop and the swamp and the camp meetings begin, and where Charleston’s ghosts, we’d argue, actually come from; see Why Charleston Is the Most Haunted City in America, and Where It Comes From. The dispatch that sits closest to Hendrix is The Water Tower: teenagers, a dare, a small town, and a thing you see at seventeen and carry for thirty years. From there, start with Almost Here, or browse the full list.
For the wider tradition, see Top 10 Southern Gothic Authors to Read and 7 Books for Fans of Lowcountry Gothic.
Sources
- Charleston City Paper, interview with Grady Hendrix on How to Sell a Haunted House, January 2023.
- Quirk Books (publisher) pages for the three novels.