Books like “The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires”

What to read after “The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires” by Grady Hendrix: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

About “The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires”

Another favorite book?

Or start with a well-known book

1
The House Next Door
Anne Rivers Siddons · 1978
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic” and “Creeping Dread”
A new house is built beside the Kennedys in their quiet Atlanta neighbourhood. Over two years the families who move in are destroyed by scandal and violence, and even visitors are touched. Colquitt begins to believe the house itself is malevolent, and decides to warn the world.
2
Ghost Eaters
Clay McLeod Chapman · 2022
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic” and “Creeping Dread”
- Southern Gothic
- Creeping Dread
Erin is still grieving her ex-boyfriend Silas when a friend offers her Ghost, a drug that lets users see the dead. She takes it hoping for one more conversation with him, and finds the boundary between the living and the dead starting to give way around her.
3
The Elementals
Michael McDowell · 1981
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic” and “Creeping Dread”
- Southern Gothic
- Creeping Dread
Two related families spend a summer at Beldame, a lonely stretch of Alabama coast where three Victorian houses face the Gulf. The third house is slowly drowning in sand, and something inside it has been waiting for the children since they were small.
4
The Spite House
Johnny Compton · 2023
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic” and “Creeping Dread”
- Southern Gothic
- Creeping Dread
Eric Ross is on the run with his two daughters, taking whatever work he can find. He answers an ad offering a large sum to anyone who will stay in the Masson House, a spite house in Texas said to be the state's most haunted, and record what happens there. The house may also hold answers about his family.
5
The Reformatory
Tananarive Due · 2023
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic” and “Creeping Dread”
Florida, 1950. Twelve-year-old Robert is sent to a brutal reform school after a scuffle with a white teenager. He can see ghosts, including the boys who died there, and the warden wants to use that ability. Outside, his sister works with a lawyer to bring him home.
6
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee · 1960
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic”
- Southern Gothic
- Small Town Secrets
A girl grows up in a sleepy Alabama town where her father, a lawyer, defends a Black man falsely accused of a crime. Through her eyes we watch the town's prejudice, the trial, and a reclusive neighbour's secret. A classic about childhood, race and courage.
7
Dead Until Dark
Charlaine Harris · 2001
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic”
Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress in Bon Temps, Louisiana, has given up on dating until a vampire named Bill Compton walks into the bar. As the town's first vampire resident, Bill draws suspicion, and when women close to Sookie are murdered, she must use her gift to find the killer.
8
The Little Friend
Donna Tartt · 2002
Similar atmosphere: “Southern Gothic”
- Southern Gothic
- Small Town Secrets
Years after a boy was found hanged in the family garden, his younger sister sets out to learn who killed him. Her amateur sleuthing among the town's odd characters pulls her from her grieving family into a dangerous, half-understood world.
9
Ghost Story
Peter Straub · 1979
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Creeping Dread
- Small Town Secrets
Four elderly friends in a small New York town have spent a lifetime telling each other ghost stories at their club. Now something from a winter forty years earlier, a death they all helped to hide, has returned to collect the debt.
10
What Moves the Dead
T. Kingfisher · 2022
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Creeping Dread
Alex Easton travels to the Ushers' decaying manor to see a childhood friend who is dying. Madeline's body is changing in ways the doctors cannot explain, down to the hairs on her arms, the local hares behave strangely, and the tarn beside the house seems to be watching.
11
My Heart Is a Chainsaw
Stephen Graham Jones · 2021
Same genre: “Horror fiction”
- Small Town Secrets
- Survival
Jade, a high-school senior obsessed with slasher films, is sure a killer has come to her small Idaho town. Nobody believes her, so she pins her hopes on a new classmate she thinks is destined to be the final girl who survives. Her theory is also a way of outlasting her own life.
12
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Shirley Jackson · 1962
Similar atmosphere: “Creeping Dread”
- Creeping Dread
- Small Town Secrets
Eighteen-year-old Merricat lives with her sister and uncle in a large house outside a village that despises them, after the rest of the family died years earlier from poison. When a cousin arrives hoping to claim the estate, the careful order of Merricat's world is broken.