Book Review: Bless Your Heart | Lindy Ryan

A dash of Sweet Magnolias, a splash of Salem’s Lot, and a sprinkle of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and you’ll get close to this hysterical, absurd, cozy horror novel, Bless Your Heart by Lindy Ryan. This book is a whole lot of fun and the audio narration is top notch!

Review | Bless Your Heart

I’ve been loving the number of books publishing that are set in the 90s. That time period just barely scrapes by as old enough to have a completely different vibe, but not so old that we are calling these historical fiction (yet). Those hazy days before cell phones and social media made us all perhaps a bit too connected to one another allow for stories like this to shine.

What’s Bless Your Heart about?

It’s 1999 in southeast Texas and the Evans family is busy as ever at their funeral parlor (the only one in town). Four generations of Evans women still work together on their family business—great-grandma Ducey, grandma Lenore, mama Grace, and teenager Luna. The Evans women have worked to put ‘That Godawful Mess’—a tragic incident fifteen years earlier—behind them. It claimed the lives of Grace and Lenore’s husbands in relatively short order, and it’s left an air of gossip surrounding the Evans women that they can’t escape.

Is it karma, then, when the biggest town gossip Mina Jean Murphy dies unexpectedly and ends up in their funeral parlor? (As an aside, how fitting is the name “Mina Jean” for a southern busybody?) Mina Jean never met a cigarette she could turn away, and the cancer finally took her. But not long after her body arrives at the Evan’s funeral parlor to be prepared for burial, it turns out that her body isn’t quite as dead as it seemed. Mina Jean is in the middle of having her funeral make up applied (Vamp lipstick is a nice touch), when her body rises right up from her coffin. Thankfully the Evans women are always prepared with a silver blade close at hand.

As the Evans women know better than anyone, Mina Jean’s undead rising is only the beginning of another flare that links to That Godawful Mess and it’s time for them to bring Luna into the fold. They have protected her as long as they can; the Evans women are the only ones who can stop the Strigoi—a supernatural creature they refer to as the “original vampire”—and prevent the plague from spreading to body after body. As the Evans women tackle the rising problem and try to discover who is behind the return of the Strigoi, they begin to realize that in a family and town with so many dark secrets, dead bodies aren’t the only thing you hope stays buried…

Why should you read it?

Don’t let the cute title and cover fool you into thinking this is a fluffy book—I would firmly consider this cozy horror. The book is humorous, but it has it’s share of (not overly graphic) gore. This is a book about the undead, after all. I personally didn’t find it too gory, but I think that depends on how much you can tolerate. I can handle up to a light-to-moderate amount and presented in a way that isn’t too dark—this book hit well within my range.

Lindy Ryan brings a wonderful wittiness to the dialogue in this book that is balanced perfectly with the southern drawl and charm. I listened to the audiobook which was narrated by Stephanie Németh-Parker and she brought that mix of biting wit and southern charm to life through this book. Ironically (given that this does have some gore), I think the audiobook might be the way to go over the physical book if you worry about it being too much. In the audiobook, those moments slid right by like a cold glass of lemonade, whereas reading the words can make you fixate on them longer and get stuck. Just my advice though!

Through alternating chapters, the reader gets the full spectrum of how people in this small town are finding out what is going on (with heavy emphasis on the Evans women). Luna, for instance, hasn’t been brought into the loop about the Strigoi or the general vampire slaying and undead burials that her family has done for generations. Luna’s mother Grace also is clearly carrying a heavier burden through the book—her chapters aren’t as sarcastic and light hearted as those narrated by grandma Lenore and great-grandma Ducey (who are, as the southerners say, a ‘hoot’). You’ll find out why Grace is responding that way as the events unfold and you learn the full truth about ‘That Godawful Mess’. That happens later in the story so just know going in that you’ll get the answers, but they come when it’s time for Luna to learn them as well.

Is there anything I’d change?

I saw another reviewer remark that Grace and Andy (Luna’s boyfriend) don’t have enough character development for their storylines to pay off at the end. I agree completely, and I think this is more true for Andy than it is for Grace, but it applies to both. There needs to be enough investment in their relationships with Luna for the emotional impact that their story arcs carry. Perhaps Ryan made the creative decision that she wanted to stick to dark humor as the tone for this book and worried about anything emotional weighing it down. I can’t say for sure because I read it the way it is. My only thought was that perhaps an epilogue might have helped with this, showing Luna and the other characters months or a year after the events of the book. We needed more of Ryan’s signature humor at the end—something we a bit of a wink and a sugar-coated verbal jab at the antagonists, delivered as sweetly as southern iced tea.

Final Thoughts

This book is absolutely a delight to read! It’s fun, dark, bizarre, and witty. Ryan’s writing adds the perfect comedic tone to the book, and Stephanie Németh-Parker’s narration on the audiobook brought it to life. If you’re a fan of Grady Hendrix, you’ll love this book.

Thank you to Minotaur Books and Macmillan Audio for my copy. Opinions are my own.

About the Author | Lindy Ryan

Lindy Miller Ryan is a Bram Stoker Awards®-nominated and Silver Falchion Award-winning editor, author, short-film director, and professor. Ryan the current author-in-residence at Rue Morgue, the world’s leading horror culture and entertainment brand, and a regular contributor at Booktrib and LitReactor. Her guest articles and features include NPR, BBC Culture, Irish Times, Daily Mail, and more. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), the International Thriller Writers (ITW), and the Brothers Grimm Society of North America. In 2022, she was named one of horror’s most masterful anthology curators, alongside Ellen Datlow and Christopher Golden, and has been declared a “champion for women’s voices in horror” by Shelf Awareness (2023). Her animated short film, TRICK OR TREAT, ALISTAIR GRAY, based on her children’s book of the same name, won the Grand Prix Award at the 2022 ANMTN Awards.
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Ryan is currently a full-time professor at Rutgers University in the Masters of Professional Science program, She is also a guest faculty mentor in Western Connecticut State’s MFA program. Prior to her career in academia, Ryan was the co-founder of Radiant Advisors, a business intelligence research and advisory firm, where she led the company’s research and data enablement practice for clients that included 21st Century Fox Films, Warner Bros., and Disney. In 2017, Ryan founded Black Spot Books, an independent press focused on amplifying underrepresented voices in horror, where she maintains her role as President after the company was acquired in 2019 as an imprint of Vesuvian Media Group. Ryan served from 2020 to 2022 on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association and was named one of Publishers Weekly‘s 2020 Star Watch Honorees. Currently, she is the co-chair of the Horror Writers Association Publishers Council.

Ryan grew up cutting her teeth on Goosebumps and universal monsters. She has published numerous academic texts and also writes clean, seasonal romance under the name ​Lindy Miller, where her books have been adapted for screen.

About the Book | Bless Your Heart

Rise and shine. The Evans women have some undead to kill.

It’s 1999 in Southeast Texas and the Evans women, owners of the only funeral parlor in town, are keeping steady with…normal business. The dead die, you bury them. End of story. That’s how Ducey Evans has done it for the last eighty years, and her progeny―Lenore the experimenter and Grace, Lenore’s soft-hearted daughter, have run Evans Funeral Parlor for the last fifteen years without drama. Ever since That Godawful Mess that left two bodies in the ground and Grace raising her infant daughter Luna, alone.

But when town gossip Mina Jean Murphy’s body is brought in for a regular burial and she rises from the dead instead, it’s clear that the Strigoi―the original vampire―are back. And the Evans women are the ones who need to fight back to protect their town.

As more folks in town turn up dead and Deputy Roger Taylor begins asking way too many questions, Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and now Luna, must take up their blades and figure out who is behind the Strigoi’s return. As the saying goes, what rises up, must go back down. But as unspoken secrets and revelations spill from the past into the present, the Evans family must face that sometimes, the dead aren’t the only things you want to keep buried.

A crackling mystery-horror novel with big-hearted characters and Southern charm with a bite, Bless Your Heart is a gasp-worthy delight from start to finish.