Bless Your Heart

Bless Your Heart is Lindy Ryan's Bram Stoker Award-finalist debut, a Southern Gothic horror-comedy set in 1999 Southeast Texas. The Evans women have run the town's only funeral parlor for eighty years — Ducey, her daughter Lenore, and Lenore's daughter Grace have kept business steady and quiet, save for an old family scandal that left Grace raising her own daughter, Luna, alone. That quiet ends when town gossip Mina Jean Murphy rises from the dead on the embalming table, proof that the Strigoi, the original vampire, have returned.

As more bodies turn up and a local deputy starts asking questions the family can't afford to answer, four generations of Evans women pick up their blades to hunt down whatever is raising the dead — and confront the buried secrets of their own past along the way. Reviewers have described it as "Steel Magnolias meets Salem's Lot": graphic, blood-soaked horror set against genuine warmth, sharp Southern wit and a fierce multi-generational found-family core.

Named a Best Horror Novel of 2024 by Esquire, Paste and Betches and a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, Bless Your Heart is the first book in Ryan's Bless Your Heart series, aimed squarely at adult readers who like their horror funny, bloody and full of heart.