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.
Author
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. 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.
