Forget what you think you know about vampire fiction. The Evans women run a funeral parlor, bury the dead, and handle the ones that won’t stay down.
The thing about small towns is that they all have a family people whisper about. The ones who’ve been there forever, who run the business nobody wants to think about, who keep to themselves in ways that read as either mysterious or just plain odd. In Southeast Texas, that family is the Evans women. They operate the only funeral parlour for thirty miles. They bury the dead. They wear their widow’s weeds and their Sunday best. They mind their own business.
They also kill vampires. Have been for generations.
Lindy Ryan’s Bless Your Heart opens with a body that won’t stay put. Mina Jean Murphy, the town’s premier gossip, arrives at Evans Funeral Parlor for a standard burial and decides, instead, to sit up on the embalming table and ruin everyone’s evening. For eighty-four-year-old Ducey Evans, this is less an emergency and more an inconvenience. She’s been handling the restless dead since before her granddaughter Grace was born. She keeps a trocar handy. She knows exactly where to stick it.
What follows is 304 pages of blood, banter, and buried secrets.
The Evans women come in four generations. Ducey runs the show with a butterscotch candy perpetually tucked in her cheek and zero patience for supernatural nonsense. Her daughter Lenore carries grief like a second skin. Grace is the middle child, the worrying mother. And Luna is fifteen, blissfully unaware that her family’s real work happens after the funeral home closes for the night. Ryan parcels out the backstory in careful increments. There was something fifteen years ago. Something they call the Godawful Mess. Something that left scars nobody talks about but everybody remembers.
Now it’s 1999. The strigoi are back. And Luna’s about to learn what her great-grandmother means when she says some dead people just need killing twice.
Here’s what works, and it’s most of the book: the women. Ryan writes about family dynamics like someone who grew up surrounded by strong Southern women and took notes. The banter snaps. The love runs deep but never saccharine. When Ducey tells Luna that love isn’t salvation for Evans women but a curse, it lands with the weight of generations. These aren’t characters who exist to be killed off for plot reasons. They’re people you’d want on your side in a fight, partly because they’d win and partly because they’d talk shit about the losers afterwards.
The horror lands harder than the cover suggests. That’s worth repeating. The cover art, with its cartoonish vampire teeth and pastel palette, suggests something closer to Gilmore Girls with fangs. Ryan has other plans. She writes gore with genuine relish. Bodies don’t just die; they’re torn apart, eviscerated, reduced to viscera that makes seasoned deputies lose their lunch. The strigoi themselves fall somewhere between vampires and zombies. They rot. They feed. They keep coming.
Ryan’s prose reads like someone who loves both Flannery O’Connor and splatterpunk. The sentences are clean but never clinical. She lets dialogue carry the weight of character work. She trusts readers to keep up. Reading her writing is like watching someone braid rope, the strands look simple on their own, but the finished product holds weight you don’t expect.
Deputy Roger Taylor starts asking questions about missing persons. Sheriff Buck Johnson loves his red coonhound more than his wife. The procedural thread runs alongside the supernatural one, and Ryan keeps them from tangling until the moment they’re supposed to collide. You get the sense she’s read her Tana French alongside her Anne Rice.
Where the book lands in the genre conversation is interesting. The obvious comparison is Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, and Ryan’s heard it before. But where Hendrix writes about women victimised by forces they can’t control, Ryan writes about women who’ve been in control the whole time. The Evans family doesn’t need saving. They need backup sometimes. They need information. They don’t need a hero to ride in and fix things. They are the heroes, even when the heroes are eighty-four and worried about their blood pressure.
The Evans women run a funeral parlour as a public trust, as a private burden, as something that belongs to the community even when the community doesn’t understand what really happens after closing time. There’s a specific kind of Southern womanhood that involves feeding people and burying them and pretending those are the only two things you do. Ryan gets that. She gets it in her bones.
If you come for the horror, you’ll stay for the family drama. If you come for the family drama, you’ll stay for the horror. That’s the trick, and Ryan pulls it off.
The blood is real. The laughs are real. The love between these women is realest of all.
Bless Your Heart by Lindy Ryan
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.
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