The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

Miss Mary first heard the hoot owl, a symbol for danger, when she was a girl, on the night of Leon Simms’s lynching. In the novel, the owl appears when something sinister is lurking, and is particularly associated with James Harris. Unlike the photographs, which prove criminality with facts, the owl is a supernatural warning that most characters would rather ignore—it would mean acknowledging things aren’t as pleasant as they seem. In Chapter 4, when Miss Mary claims to see an owl and Patricia dismisses her alarm, Miss Mary cryptically cautions: “Whether you like it or not […] you’ve got owls” (50). In the novel, actively choose not to pay attention to the undesirable leads to tragedy—the characters must learn to hear the owl when it hoots.

Blue’s obsession with the Holocaust—the German WWII attempt to commit genocide by killing the entire population of European Jews, and their successful murder of over six million Jewish and Roma people and members of the LBGTQ+ community—is a prevalent motif in the novel. Patricia’s son Blue becomes obsessed with the Nazi regime, but his interest is only mildly alarming to a community deeply entrenched in white supremacist culture. Blue’s parents mostly don’t confront their son, even when he brings up topics like “medical experiments in the camps” in conversation (182), leaving James Harris, who speaks “fluent Nazi” (125) to engage with Blue on this topic. Fascism comes easily to James, who kills with ruthless abandon and believes his prey are people who “wouldn’t missed anymore” (280). His dehumanization of his victims, starting with the lynching of Leon Simms, has echoes of Nazi propaganda about their victims.