Many thanks for the ARC, NetGalley! This is the PERFECT spooky season read - I had so much fun diving into this. There's a lot of gore and blood and very descriptive parts, but man I loved this book. This book takes you back in time to a very Southern Texas scene, and introduces you to the Evans women. Lots of great misdirection and kept me turning.

Bless Your Heart by Lindy Ryan was scary! I love thrillers and reading spooky books but this one really freaked me out. It reminded me of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. Perfect read for spooky season, do yourself a favor and keep the lights on while reading!

The Evans family have a local responsibility to keep their community safe. The multigenerational ladies run a funeral parlor and are intimately involved with keeping the town free of strigoi, or zombies. This story gets involved quickly bring the reader up to date with the characters and relationships See if you can guess the culprit One warning, this book rates very high on the gore factor so beware if the reader has trouble with blood and guts

This was a fun, neat, and “homey” feel good book even with the morbid topic at hand- very much sweet magnolias vibes meets death? Whatever, it works! I think I’d have loved this as an audio book even more too!

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me an arc in exchange for an honest review!

Let's start by saying this is the best vampire book I have read this year in 2023. Bless Your Heart by Lindy Ryan is a perfect trip to South East Texas in 1999. It tells the story of the lovely Evans women who normally go about their business of running their funeral parlor as usual, except they have an extra occupation. Putting down the dead. In this book you follow Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and Luna, each are very strong women but not too strong where they overshadow each other. Each woman has given up more than they know while protecting the rest of their small town and their wins and losses are told beautifully.
Every chapter share more of their personality, set of mannerisms, and secrets that make them feel like real people. This book combined humor with horror and I can not recommend this book enough. It captured your fear of vampires, your disbelief of the brutality's they can cause and seasoned it with some Texas summer heat.

I think the book might have been improved with 3 generations of women rather than 2. The characters of Grace and Lenore ran together for me. I couldn't distinguish between them. Loved the Texas setting and the townsfolk. Fun read.

Creative and almost original. I did set it aside at one point not knowing if i would come back to it, but I am glad I did. The characters got better through the book and the misdirection was fun. A great Halloween read

This was alright. Not quite horror, not quite mystery. A few too many POVs and a too little action for my tastes. It felt more like things happening to people who then talked about how they needed to do something about it but it takes until the 80% mark for that something to really start. Fun concept, though, and engaging enough characters.

I think if you like Grady Hendrix, you'll probably enjoy this as well.

Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books for an ARC in exchange for a review.

Mix Steel Magnolias with Salem’s Lot and you'll end up with something a lot like Lindy Ryan's excellent, gory, heartfelt horror show, Bless Your Heart. How a book that graphically describes the ripping of throats and slashing of abdomens by creatures of the night also manages to be genuinely sweet, I'll never know, but Ryan pulls it off. Her novel, which comes out in April 2024, is a shot of pure southern charm straight to the jugular.

For all you 90s babies, you’ll be happy to know this one takes us back to 1999, where four female generations of the Evans family — great-grandma Ducey, grandma Lenore, mother Grace, and teenaged daughter Luna — run the only funeral parlor in their small Southeast Texas town. They’ve worked hard to put a tragic incident (nicknamed ‘That Godawful Mess’) from 15 years earlier behind them, one that claimed the lives of both Grace and Lenore’s husbands. But when town gossip Mina Jean Murphy dies unexpectedly and is brought into the funeral home to be prepared for burial, it turns out her body isn’t quite as dead as previously thought: Mina Jean rises from her coffin in the middle of having her funereal makeup applied, and the Evans women have to put her down. For good.

That crisis (narrowly) averted, they soon realize the events of That Godawful Mess aren’t as buried as they thought, and the Strigoi ― a type of supernatural creature referred to as the ‘original’ vampire ― have somehow returned to town. Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and Luna are the only ones who can stop the spreading plague, with body after body turning up dead, while also reckoning with a whole host of family secrets threatening to spill out quicker than a mangled jugular . . . of which there are many in this book, described in painstakingly graphic detail. (Soft stomachs be warned.)

I’d never had the pleasure of reading horror author Lindy Ryan before, but it took all of one chapter for me to fall in love with her writing style. The dialogue is full of equal parts southern niceties and witty repartee, even as characters are in the midst of a gruesome fight for their lives. Which is a tough balance to achieve without the book coming across as either overly saccharine or tonally disparate, but I found that it really works here. This is a fun book, plain and simple. It’s paced well, is full of gnarly scenes of horror, and the character work is *chef’s kiss*. (Dracula’s kiss?)

The only major gripe I ended up having with Bless Your Heart is the lack of depth when it comes to two major characters: Luna’s high school boyfriend, Andy, and Grace, Luna’s mom. Obvi don’t want to spoil things for you, so I’ll just say that both of them are massively underdeveloped in my opinion, which sabotages the emotional payoff at the end of the book. Things wrap up in a way that feels bizarrely rushed, mainly because of how Grace and Andy’s stories are tied off, which is a let down considering how strong the story is up until that point. Not enough to ruin the reading experience, but enough to make me wonder about certain creative decisions.

Those issues aside, this novel is such a thrill. It’s an absolutely perfect follow-up for fans of Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (or any other book in Hendrix’s ouevre — he and Ryan both do southern horror with touches of comedy really well). Hiiiiiighly recommend when it hits shelves on April 9, 2024.

Thank you to NetGalley and Minotaur Books for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Read For:
90s’ Nostalgia
Family Business
Southern Charm
Slaying the Dead
Strong Women MC’s

This made me think of “The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires” (but well written) meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It gave the small town vibes and a secret only a few knew about. Yet, there was still a great balance between horror and comedy. Definitely something that would be fun to read with a book club tbh. There was drama, mystery, and of course, horror all throughout with some good old southern charm tying it all together.

This was so fun!! I loved the characters, the strong southern elements, the tight family unit, and the general humor. The characters were so funny. This felt like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but funnier and more strong women. Definitely recommend!

This book was so much more fun than I could have ever anticipated! Not only is the cover perfect but I felt like I was reading a mixture of southern charm meets Salem's Lot! Just pure delicious fun!

I received a free ARC from NetGalley.

This book was bad.

I didn't care about any of the 4 generations of Evans women because none of them was more than a single obnoxious habit blown into a maddening level of repetition.
Ducey - crabby oldest woman who ate butterscotch candies CONSTANTLY. She must have eaten at least 50 in the course of the book which took place over maybe 3 days? Somebody should count how many she eats, but that person won't be me.
Lenore - crabby older middle aged woman who was obsessively winds clocks and fusses with garden/rosebush. So. much. winding.
Grace - anxious younger middle aged woman who constantly rubs a scar on her wrist and pulls her sleeves over it.
Luna - teenage girl who was actually the most interesting because she has 2 friends, fights with her mom, is unsure about her boyfriend's affection while simutaneously interested in the dark new kid at school. Typical mundane teen stuff but at least it's more than one trait/behavior.
And the first 95% of the book is the 3 older women seeing that a Godawful Mess is happening and doing basically fuck-all about it. They take care of what gets wheeled in the door and spend the rest of the time arguing about what to do while eating butterscotch candies, winding clocks, rubbing scars, and waiting around for the Godawful Mess to conveniently show up at their door.
The twist at the end was no surprise and the title doesn't work. Also, roses don't come in blue and don't grow from seed. Ants don't live in a hive and dogs don't sweat.

Horror with Heart

Thanks to the lovely NetGalley, I recently finished an advanced copy of Lindy Ryan's debut novel "Bless Your Heart", hitting bookshelves April 9, 2024. Set in Southeast Texas in the late 1990s, the novel focuses on four generations of Evans women who run the local funeral parlor and keep the town safe (that one Godawful Mess aside) from any would-be dead that don't know how to stay where they belong.

It's been 15 years since Ducey, Lenore, and Grace Evans had anything to worry about. Now that Luna Evans is in high school, making friends with that weird boy, and the dead are suddenly restless... could another Godawful Mess be right around the corner?

Big on both family ties and gore, "Bless Your Heart" is one to check out if you enjoy mystery, horror, multiple perspectives and a late-night who-done-it.

The Evans women put on a good show! A fun read that felt pretty light considering the subject matter. This story centered around four generations of a family that run a small town funeral parlor. They have a love/hate relationship with the police in town, which quickly becomes apparent when locals start showing up mutilated. There's also a new creepy kid in town that looks like a Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold wannabe with his trenchcoat.

I think this book can appeal to many different people just based off the generations and of people in the book. The youngest character being 15, and the oldest being in her 70s and very light romance mixed in. If I had any critiques, I would have liked more romantic relationship development. It was fun to travel back to 1999 and remember some of the cultural happenings.

Overall this is an easy book to pick up and enjoy! I haven't read anything from Lindy Ryan prior to this and would definitely pick up her future titles.

Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press, and Minotaur Books for this ARC!

This story is a blast! Ryan has a talent for making horror, comedy, and the Supernatural flow seamlessly. I was thoroughly satisfied at the end of this, but also super glad I read it during the day.

Being from the south and seeing the title "Bless Your Heart" made this an instant read.

The story of four generations of woman who run a small towns only funeral parlor, it started off strong. The introduction of strigoi (sort of ghoul/vampire mashup) had me interested at first. Then the story just kind of dragged and dragged.

The characters were all flawed, but had likeable strengths. The family dynamic seemed well done, but then the non-stop southern phrases got rather old. They were not nearly as charming as I think the intent was.

Sad ending, but somewhat predictable. Over all it was pretty readable and I would check out a sequel if it were written. I think there is a lot of potential here, but it fell a little flat for me. Could have definitely been a shorter book.
This would make a good TV series with a few story line tweaks. I'd give this a solid 3.5 stars.

Thanks to NetGalley for access to review this ARC copy.

I have mixed feelings about this book; it's well-written, and the characters are funny but the story develops way too slowly to be enjoyable.

1999. It is summer in Texas and the Evans women, owners of the only funeral home in town have their hands full. The dead are rising again, evil has returned, and they must fulfill their duty to keep the dead where they belong. Luna is the youngest of the Evans. At fifteen, she knows her family is different. When one of the dead rises in front of her, she starts to unravel her family’s secrets, especially the one involving a fateful night 15 years ago when she was just a baby. As bodies start to pile up and her nightmares become worse, it is time to face her purpose and the powerful vampire that is wreaking havoc in her small town.

Told in alternating points of view, this mystery/horror story reads as a YA novel. We follow Luna Evans' unique coming of age as she must contend with the truth about her family and her own challenges as an adolescent. The story has plenty of gore and gets a little slow at times but held my interest long enough to care about the characters.
This is my first time reading a horror novel and I enjoyed it, though I am not inclined to follow these characters on a future journey. However, if you like horror, gore, a little humor, and southern vampire themes, you might enjoy this novel.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing me with a free digital copy of this book in return for an honest review.
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I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. This was a great read. Horror, Comedy and supernatural all rolled up to a seamless read. I could not put it down.