Another Fine Mess by Lindy Ryan, an Exclusive First Look.

Ginger Nuts of Horror is proud to present an exclusive first look at the prologue of Another Fine Mess by Lindy Ryan, the highly anticipated and eagerly awaited sequel to the much-loved novel Bless Your Heart.

Another Fine Mess by Lindy Ryan

The Evans women are back in this rollicking, unputdownable sequel to Bless Your Heart!

For over a hundred years, the Evans women have kept the undead in their strange southeast Texas town from rising. But sometimes the dead rise too quickly – and that’s what left Lenore Evans and her granddaughter, Luna, burying Luna’s mother, Grace, and Lenore’s mother, Ducey. Now the only two women left in the Evans family, Luna and Lenore are left rudderless in the wake of the most Godawful Mess to date.

But when the full moon finds another victim, it’s clear their trouble is far from over. Now Lenore, Luna, and the new sheriff ― their biggest ally ― must dig deep down into family lore to uncover what threatens everything they love most. The body count ticks up, the most unexpected dead will rise – and force Lenore and Luna to face the possibility that the undead aren’t the only monsters preying on their small town.

Another Fine Mess Prologue

Pie Evans, September 1983

When the old grandfather clock in the parlor struck midnight, Priscilla Evans celebrated her ninety-third birthday with a box of store-bought vanilla wafers and a bowl of homemade banana pudding—her mother’s recipe.

She sat at the small kitchen table with nothing but a blank sheet of paper for company and used the wafers to spoon cold cream straight from the dish while she wrote. From cellophane sack to pudding bowl and down her gullet, and when the moon grew bright enough that she could see the space between the trees, and her pencil tip had worn to a nub, Pie left the letter on the table and pushed up from her seat. She covered the leftovers with wax paper. 

Pie stuffed the pudding bowl in the icebox and the cookies in the cupboard, and then she put away the supper dishes and tidied her small bedroom in the back of the funeral parlor. 

She brushed her teeth. 

She wound the clock. 

When her chores were finished, Pie braided her long white hair and stripped down to a simple cotton nightgown. She picked up the old Winchester she kept by the back door and slipped a cartridge into her pocket. Pie said goodbye to the pudding and to the cookies, to her small bedroom and to her late mother’s grandfather clock in the parlor. To the letter left on the kitchen table.

And then she went out alone into the dark to dig a hole. 

Far from the first, she thought, but, Lord willing, this would be the last.

Humid nighttime air tongued Pie’s cheek as she made her way to the edge of what remained of her family’s property. The shovel stood where she’d left it staked in the ground, right where the moonlight touched grass, where the green grew a little coarser than the rest. 

Lightning scratched across a tissue-paper sky and Pie stuck her tongue out to taste the air. This time of year always brought storms through rural southeast Texas. The heat let up enough to breathe and the weather started to change. Nothing turned pretty in late September, and a chill didn’t set in till November, but still-simmering temperatures meant rain. All the wet that had blown through earlier softened the summer-dried dirt, but left the stink of ozone hot on its breath. Any minute now, and the sky would open.

But she’d be done digging long before then.

Pie palmed sweat away, wicked the moisture on her dress, and wrenched the shovel free. She could do without the throb in her joints and the aches in her bones, the constant twinge in her bad ankle, but Pie Evans was not the sort of woman to shy away from a little midnight yard work.

She wasn’t the kind of woman to shy away from anything, really. 

“Never have been,” Pie muttered as she traded the gun for the shovel and stabbed metal into earth. “And I reckon tonight ain’t the time to start.”

Pie spooned soggy dirt from north to south—until brown reached her ankles, then stained the cotton hem of the gown, her calves. When her skirts started to stick to her knees, she tossed the shovel aside and climbed out of the grave. 

With the rifle as a crutch at her side, Pie limped back to what used to be Daddy’s old farmhouse and settled into her favorite cowhide rocker. She laid the gun across her ruined skirt, and the barrel bumped the other chair, set it rocking. She lit a pinch of rolled tobacco. 

And then she stared out into the hot, hungry, crackling dark, and waited to die.

Pie had waited a long time for this night to come. 

Too damn long, she’d be happy to tell anyone who bothered to ask, not that anyone ever did. Folks around town had given Pie Evans a wide berth for as long as she could remember—but if that had bothered her once, it didn’t now. As far as she was concerned, most people didn’t have the good sense God gave a goose.

On a good day, the rest might remember not to go after a hornet’s nest with a short stick. With folks like that around, it’d take more than sideways glances and fencepost gossip to get under skin as tough as Pie’s. Besides, the way she saw it, all those cold shoulders did her a favor: the less people paid her any mind when they were alive, the less she had to mourn them when they turned up dead.

The less she had to care when she put them back down.

Her braid ticked across her back, a pendulum keeping time, counting down. “Too damn long is right,” Pie said to the lightening dark.

Cowhide prickled her thighs under the dirty cotton shift, and Pie raked age-hardened fingernails into the thin cloth. The porch slats creaked under the weight of the rocker, the press of the wood clammy under her bare feet, the first breath of almost-morning fresh on her skin. 

In the distance, thunder rolled. Pie licked the taste of the storm from her lips as she chewed at the roll of tobacco pinched between her teeth.

Used to be, when Pie’s daddy built the old dogtrot farmhouse for him and Mama and her, before her twin brothers ever came along, a person could sit on this porch and stare out at nothing but pine trees and dirt, far as the eye could see. Back then, most folks who settled on this little knob of swampy prairie between the Neches and the Nothing either raised rice, cattle, or timber, or worked on the river. 

But that had been before the geyser struck.

Before the fire. Pie exhaled the thought in a cloud of bitter smoke and tightened her grip on the bolt-action rifle in her lap, eyed the line of dirt trapped beneath her nails. She’d been a girl of twelve when she’d faced her first ghoul, damn near a hundred years ago now. Her bad ankle twinged. A lot had changed between that night and this, but it had all started here, at the Evanses’. 

And for Pie, this would be where it ended.

Another flash of lightning clawed the sky open, and dense autumn raindrops splattered against the porch roof. A tug pulled somewhere deep in her gut, and Pie’s braid stopped ticking. The long length of white cord slipped over her shoulder as she dug one foot into the wood to halt the rocker. 

He’d crossed the property line. 

Pie knew this land like she knew the back of her hand. She could feel him move out there in the dark, in the heat, in the wet. The one she’d been waiting for.

At least, she hoped it was.

“Better safe than sorry, I reckon.” Pie bolted a round in the Winchester’s chamber. She lifted the rifle and peered through its iron sights. “Come on now,” she said to the deep smear of shadow that bloomed in the distance, heading her direction. “I’m ready.”

The shadow took shape. The dark blur became a figure, became a man, as it stalked through the rain toward Daddy’s old farmhouse. Pie’s pulse rose and her ankle throbbed, but she held the gun steady. Squinted. Just because her body had stayed strong over the long years didn’t mean her eyes didn’t give her hell. 

And a ghoul at fifty paces was a ghoul at fifty paces.

This time the thunder rolled into a voice, filling the space between raindrops as it wafted over the distance to brush her cheek. 

“Happy Birthday, Priscilla,” it said.

She swatted the noise away and took another drag off the cigarette. Her vision might be shot, but her hearing was still sharp as a tack. She held the smoke in her mouth until her lungs singed, then Pie exhaled through her nose and spit the butt onto the porch to burn itself out. 

“Happy birthday, yourself,” she grunted back through the gun’s sights, then, “And nobody calls me that anymore.”

“Sure they don’t.” The dead man stopped out of the rain’s reach, inside the shadows that hung over the edge of the porch. Dark hair, midnight eyes, straight nose, and a jaw that promised dimples. Something flickered across his eyes, maybe the moonlight fighting back the approaching dawn. “You mussed up your dress, Pie,” he teased in a low drawl, the corners of his lips quirking up in a way that made him look human. “Course, I haven’t seen you so prettied up since you were knee-high on a grasshopper.” 

Pie stomped, bits of dried mud crumbling on the wood slats at her feet. “Never you mind about my dress.”

“See you’ve still got my old gun, too.” He stepped up onto the porch, smirking at the single-shot Winchester she kept upright in her arms. The way he gazed down at her made her toes tingle. “You’re not planning to shoot me with it, are you, Priscilla?”

“This old pea shooter?” Pie grunted and lowered the gun, then stomped out the tingles. “Waste of a bullet. Would just make a mess outta you. Besides,” she said as she slid the bolt back and removed the round, palming the cartridge. “Evans women are blades women.”

“I know.” 

The dead man settled into the rocker beside Pie’s in a cool wind of honey and woodsmoke. Most ghouls smelt like rot and dust, but not him. He smelled exactly the same now as he had the night he’d died. Looked the same, smelled the same.

He’s dead, and I’m the one rottin’, Pie thought. Figured.

 She laid the rifle on the slats between the chairs and flicked her braid back over her shoulder. “There was a time the name Evans meant somethin’ in this town. More than a bunch of crazy old biddies who run a funeral parlor,” she reminded him. “Back when Daddy farmed this land—before so much of it got sold off, become a cemetery to plant the dead instead of crops.”

The dead man shook wet drops from his hair, his jacket. “I remember.”

“Course,” Pie spat, “that all ended damn near a hundred years ago.”  

“I haven’t kept count.”

Pie had. Hadn’t had much of a choice, considering. Heat rose in her throat, and she clucked it away. “Nearly one hundred years since I slid headfirst into this world,” she said, “and not a single one of them has come easy.” 

 Not a single damn one. Pie studied the round in her hand, the dull shine of metal in the dark. 

The dead man gave her a weak smile. “There’s the girls.”

The girls. Pie had birthed a daughter, and that daughter had birthed a daughter, and her another daughter. Three generations of Evans women had been birthed inside these four walls, had gone off and made their own homes, though all still kept Pie’s family business. If anything in this world remained worth dying for, it was those daughters. 

And that was exactly what Pie had been waiting for, wasn’t it? What she’d written in the letter left on the kitchen table—more or less.

“You’ll look after them when I’m gone,” she instructed the dead man. “Ducey. Lenore. Grace. The next one, and the next.” 

She made him promise twice, as the sky changed from navy to royal, then, “We’d best be gettin’ on. Ducey will be over with the sun,” she said. “Girl’s always been an early riser, just like Daddy. Chaps my hide.” 

“Can’t all be night owls,” he said, smiling dimples.

Pie slid the rifle round into her pocket as she pushed herself up. “Do I look like I’m laughin’?” The twinge in her ankle made her stumble, but she swatted the dead man away when he offered a hand to steady her. 

His eyebrows furrowed, but the skin between didn’t crack. “You sure you’re ready to call it a night?” he asked.

Pie slipped her arm through his, the clammy press of the ruined nightgown as cool as the dead man’s skin against hers. “You and me both should be nothin’ but dust and bones by now,” she told the dead man. “Now, come on and help an old woman get to bed.”

He sighed. “Pie, I don’t know if I can—” 

“You have to.” The words cut her tongue, stung her gums like ant bites, but she got them out. 

The dead man pulled against her, and his midnight eyes poured over Pie’s face, her shoulders, the muddy dress as he turned his head toward her footprints on the wooden porch slats. “We don’t know,” he whispered, so faint she could barely hear it over the crisp sounds of pre-dawn. “There’s still more for me to learn.” His free hand clipped her chin. “Give me a few more years, kiddo.” 

 Pie let out one short, sharp bark. “Listen to me,” she said, pulling the dead man off the porch, into the grass, toward the shovel. “I was born here. I’ve lived my life here and, God willin’, I’ll die here too—but only once.” 

She stopped him at the edge of the hole and looked him square in the eyes. “Now, you do what needs doin’. Take it all,” she told him, “And when it’s done, make sure I stay put. Make sure I don’t claw my way back out of that grave.” 

The dead man sighed as he watched Pie fish the rifle cartridge from the pocket of her nightgown, watched her slip its length between her teeth. 

“You’re really not going to tell them,” he said, “any of them—about what they are?”

Pie spoke around the metal in her mouth as one of his hands cupped her cheek and the other slid around her back. “I told them enough,” she muttered against his cold, unbeating chest, “But some things you take to the grave.” 

Then she peered up at him, the man who’d died so she could live, the man who had to put her down now so her daughters could go on. “I mean it, Sammy,” she said. “Keep an eye on my girls, and make sure I don’t come back.”

Samael’s body tensed, but his words breathed soft against Pie’s cheek, and this time she let them rest, warm on her skin. “Anything for my best girl.”

“Nothin’ to tell them anyway,” Pie said as the dead man leaned in. 

“My girls know exactly what they are,” she said as his fangs touched her throat, pierced her skin, slid under. “They’re Evans women.”

THE ENTERPRISE

STILL NO ANSWERS IN RABID ANIMAL ATTACKS THAT LEFT SEVEN DEAD, TWO MISSING

Friday, September 24, 1999

Nearly four weeks after the last known attack, the rabid animal that police blame for leaving seven members of the community dead and two missing remains at large. 

Among the victims is high school sophomore Alison Haney (15), whose body was discovered behind the Parkdale Mall movie theater. Snow Leger (48), Edwin Boone (55), Clyde Halloran (83), and Grace (38) and Ethel “Ducey” Evans (80) are also among the deceased. Another high school sophomore, Andrew West (16), a paper delivery boy for the Enterprise,and Patsy Milner (95), a housebound widow, are missing, and suspected victims of the animal, which authorities believe to be a rabid “ghost wolf,” one of the coyote-red wolf hybrids recently spotted along the Gulf Coast. 

Sheriff Buchanan “Buck” Johnson (81) was the final victim. In the weeks since the attacks several area pets have been reported missing, but none have been recovered.

“We’re doing everything we can to locate and euthanize the infected animal or animals responsible,” says Undersheriff Roger Taylor. The attacks began on August 22 at Clyde Halloran’s homestead on Farm Road 121 and moved toward town center before ending back where they began. A month later, Animal Control has not located any animal that could have been responsible for the attacks. 

If an infected canine remains in the area, it is unlikely to be caught. Chief Medical Examiner Jedidiah Quigg says this is “less a question of police efforts than the nature of the infection.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, infected animals usually expire within seven days of becoming sick. 

Which would mean the danger has passed—but has it? Channel Six’s Penny Boudreaux isn’t so sure.

“Nine community members lost their lives last month, and not a single paw print has been entered into evidence,” says Boudreaux. 

Quigg told the Enterprise that a bite from a rabid animal requires significant treatment, including a round of seven shots followed by three rounds of follow-up immunizations given over the next fourteen days. “You don’t want to mess around with wild canine bites, rabid or otherwise,” says Quigg, noting that rabies left untreated is typically fatal for both animals and humans.

While the attacks have been officially blamed on a rabid canine, law enforcement continues to pursue other leads. Undersheriff Taylor declined to comment, but Deputy Brandon Hinson promises that no stone will be left unturned as the investigation continues. 

Following Sheriff Johnson’s passing, Undersheriff Taylor will be confirmed as his placement as Sheriff on Tuesday, September 28. 

Animal Control will test all expired animals found near FM 121 and advises any community member who feels they might have been exposed to seek immediate medical attention. A research professor from the University of Texas will also be on-site to aid in the search for any ghost wolves spotted in the area.

Forest Park High School will hold an assembly in honor of Alison Haney and Andrew West this upcoming Monday as part of the Homecoming season kick-off. Brett Haney and Katherine Brooks-Haney, parents of Alison, are expected to attend, as well as Tanya West, mother of Andrew. The Homecoming Dance is scheduled for Friday, October 1.

Another Fine Mess

Lindy Ryan

Out in paperback, eBook, and

audiobook:

17 July 2025

Lindy Ryan

Lindy Ryan is a Bram Stoker Awards®-nominated and award-winning editor, author, director, and professor. 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.

Lindy Ryan is a regular contributor at Rue Morgue, the world’s leading horror culture and entertainment brand, Booktrib, and LitReactor. Her articles and features have appeared on 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 and has been declared a “champion for women’s voices in horror” by Shelf Awareness (2023).

Further Reading

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