“Bless Your Heart” by Lindy Ryan

The sun is rising over a small Texas town and the dead are rising too. Four generations of the Evans family run a funeral parlor, putting the dead to rest, even when they have to kill them again. It’s 1999 now and the buried are growing restless. Something has come to town, leaving a bloody trail in its wake, and only the Evans women can stop it.

 Lindy Ryan takes readers back in her horror novel Bless Your Heart (Minotaur Books 2024) to the turn of the millennium, when the Satanic panic of the ‘80s has faded into fears of the Y2K scare. In this little corner of southeastern Texas, though, life is predictable: everyone knows one another, doors are left unlocked, and gossip moves fast. The Evans women attend to their family business, from elderly Ducey to her great-granddaughter Luna. That is, until the bodies start stacking up, with each death more gory than the last:

“His cheeks bloomed in ruddy patches against pale, clammy, shriveled flesh, smudged with dirt and dried blood. Sightless eyes bulged from their sockets, and crooked chips of teeth jagged downward between parted lips wet with fresh blood.”

The narrative doesn’t shy away from the gruesome bloodshed, but rather leans into it, placing readers in the morgue one chapter and a crime scene in the next. Violence in Bless Your Heart is purposeful with each detail adding to the puzzle of what’s woken from the grave so hungrily. Despite the Evans being well-versed in death, they’ve only seen something this monstrous fifteen years ago, and they can’t let it rise again. Ryan uses each of their perspectives to connect the spider web of the story, and the multiple points-of-view put readers in the shoes of town residents from the sheriff to the hair stylist, and how they know the odd Evans family:

“Each of the Evans women approached her duty differently whenever the situation called for it, but all with equal effectiveness — even if none agreed with the others’ methods.”

At the core of the book are the four Evans women who are as unique as they are deadly. There’s Ducey, the matriarch who’s as likely to indulge in butterscotch candies as she is to stab a ghoul in their heart. Her daughter, Lenore, can usually be found tending to a snow-white rosebush and running experiments. Then Grace, with her case of mortician’s makeup, hides a secret she can’t quite admit. Finally, there’s Luna, who finds herself at odds with her mother and fascinated by the new goth boy in school.

While Bless Your Heart is a supernatural story about gore, it’s also a story about the women who make up the heart of their Southern town. Readers might not relate to slaying the undead, but the love and discord of family is something familiar. What it means to be a mother and what it means to be a daughter are the pulse throughout the pages, and they shape how each of the Evans women live their lives. The people that the Evans women surround themselves with are fleshed out as well, with each character multi-dimensional and distinct. That only makes the stakes higher as readers quickly learn that there’s no guarantee everyone will survive to the end:

“She knew their hunger, their eagerness. She knew something else too — whatever made the dead rise in her small town, it had gotten tired of waiting.”

Ryan’s story is stomach churning in its grisly depictions of the undead, but there’s also moments of bright sunshine too. Ducey cracks jokes, vivacious even after years of fighting the restless dead, and Luna gripes about high school like any other teenager. With allusions to Gothic touchstones like Type O Negative’s albums and Interview with the Vampire paperbacks, the story balances macabre pop culture in the ‘90s with the superstitions of the South. As the sun starts to set over Texas, readers prepare for the undead and reflect on how they live their own life too.

Lindy Ryan

Lindy Ryan is an award-winning author, director, and anthologist who was raised in Southeast Texas. Bless Your Heart is her debut novel and is followed by a sequel, Another Fine Mess (Minotaur Books 2025). She also writes magical romance novels under the pen name Lindy Miller. In addition to being an author, Ryan is a professor at Rutgers University and the current author-in-residence at Rue Morgue. Ryan currently lives on the East Coast.