Danny McBride and his The Righteous Gemstones collaborator Edi Patterson have been tapped to work with best-selling novelist Grady Hendrix to adapt Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. Hendrix, best known for his novel The Final Girl Support Group (which is itself in development at Warner Bros.), will bring the project to HBO. A previous version of the project, in development at Prime Video with PKM Productions, has been scrapped. The quirky horror-comedy might bring to mind titles like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and that’s not without reason: Quirk Books, who specialized for a time in oddball genre fiction, published both.
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During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when students were learning from home, Hendrix hosted a podcast called Super Scary Haunted Homeschool, which The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by telling stories about the history of vampires. It isn’t clear whether any of that “bonus material” might find its way into the TV show, but it seems likely.
Per Deadline, who first reported the news, Hendrix, McBride and Patterson will exec produce, alongside Brandon James for McBride’s Rough House Pictures. Quirk Books will also get an executive producer credit. Hendrix previously got a screen credit on Satanic Panic, a 2019 horror-comedy starring Rebecca Romijn.
With San Diego Comic Con on the horizon, some are expecting to hear news about Booster Gold, another HBO series. A few weeks ago, internet buzz had McBride and Patterson attached to that project as well, although there was no substantial evidence to back it up.
Here’s how Hendrix’s book is described at Quirk Books:
Patricia Campbell’s life has never felt smaller. Her husband is a workaholic, her teenage kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she’s always a step behind on her endless to-do list. The only thing keeping her sane is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime. At these meetings they’re as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are about their own families.
One evening after book club, Patricia is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbor, bringing the neighbor’s handsome nephew, James Harris, into her life. James is well traveled and well read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn’t felt in years. But when children on the other side of town go missing, their deaths written off by local police, Patricia has reason to believe James Harris is more of a Bundy than a Brad Pitt. The real problem? James is a monster of a different kind-and Patricia has already invited him in.
Little by little, James will insinuate himself into Patricia’s life and try to take everything she took for granted-including the book club-but she won’t surrender without a fight in this blood-soaked tale of neighborly kindness gone wrong.
