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.

IN A NUTSHELL
A solid horror story with some original twists on why the dead rise and what needs to be done when they do. What made it stand out for me was watching the interactions of the four generations of Evans women who run the only funeral parlour in this small Texas town and who, unbeknownst to their neighbours, put down any dead who rise. My favourite character was Ducey Evans, an octogenarian who can still wield a trocar to put down a hungry revenant.

Maybe it was the cover, or the title or the publisher’s synopsis, but I went into ‘Bless Your Heart‘ expecting a cosy supernatural mystery with quaint Southern characters and a lot of humour. It’s not that kind of book at all.

This is a story about four generations of tough Southwest Texas women running a small-town funeral parlour, whose lives have been shaped, perhaps even blighted, by their knowledge that the dead sometimes rise and by their covert, self-appointed role of putting them back in the ground when they do.

This is a horror novel filled with violence, death and gore. These risen dead don’t shuffle around aimlessly, murmuring “Brains”. They hunt, they rip people apart, and they grow stronger with every kill.

The action scenes (there were many of them) were tense, often blood-soaked and vividly described.

I thought the Evans women were well-drawn. Each was formidable in their own way. The relationship between the generations was credible.  For the three older generations of Evans women, putting the risen dead back in the ground is a routine thing that they do with practised efficiency (even though they each think their method is better than that of the other two women). The youngest Evans woman, still a teenager, lives in ignorance of the risen dead and her family’s covert role. The Evans women have a traumatic history and a habit of secrecy reinforced by the fear that, one day soon, history will repeat itself. 

I liked that the main characters grew throughout the story and their relationships with each other changed, sometimes in surprising ways.

I thought the secrets at the heart of the story were revealed with skill, making sense of the action and the relationships and laying the foundation for a series of books.

I’ll be back for ‘Another Fine Mess’ (2025), the second book in the series.

I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Stephanie Németh-Parker. I was impressed by how clearly she managed to differentiate the voices of four generations of Evans women. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.

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Lindy Ryan is an award-winning author, anthologist, and short-film director whose books and anthologies have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal. She also writes sweet, seasonal romance under the pseudonym Lindy Miller. Several of her projects have been adapted for screen.

Ryan is the current author-in-residence at Rue Morgue and a columnist at BookTrib. Declared a “champion for women’s voices in horror” by Shelf Awareness, Ryan was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree in 2020, and in 2022, she was named one of horror’s most masterful anthology curators. ​She previously served on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) and currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Brothers Grimm Society of North America.

She is an award-winning professor at Rutgers University, and a guest faculty mentor in Western Connecticut State University’s Creative Writing MFA program.

Prior to her career in academia, Ryan co-founded Radiant Advisors, a business intelligence research and advisory firm, where she led the company’s research and data enablement practice for clients including 21st Century Fox Films, Warner Bros., and Disney. Ryan founded Black Spot Books, a specialty press focused on amplifying women’s voices in horror, in 2017, which was acquired as an imprint of Vesuvian Media Group in 2019.

Born and raised in Southeast Texas, Ryan currently resides on the East Coast.​​​