“Love wasn’t salvation for Evans women, it was a curse.”

Southeastern Texas is full of vampires, or rather ‘strigoi,’ an old word from Romanian folklore that describes the “restless dead.”  The Evans women consider themselves caretakers; four generations run the Evans Funeral Parlor, and caretaking means putting their friends and neighbors to rest without incident, especially when they won’t stay dead.  As it’s revealed in the early pages of Lindy Ryan’s Bless Your Heart, this has almost become a matter of professional mundanity.  Once every few months or so, one of the deceased in their community will rise from the embalming table and the Evanses put them back down before the strigoi eat any of their neighbors.  Ducey Evans and her trocar handle most of the ghouls as she lacks the patience for small-town niceties that her daughter Lenore, and granddaughter Grace offer.  The grimmer aspects of the already macabre family business are a well-guarded secret, after all as single women running the only funeral parlor alone, they’re already the source of plenty of town gossip.  The youngest Evans, Luna is unaware of the grisly nature of her family’s work.  She was just a baby when that Godawful Mess happened fifteen years ago, and knows nothing of that day that lives in infamy to the older three Evans women. 

The book picks up in 1999, so front-loaded with lore it feels like a reboot or sequel to a series that never was.  The effect of this approach is positive, giving you a sense of momentum and intrigue with a past that unfolds in little bites.  Things kick off when an unusual number of “restless dead” turn up at the funeral home, a few of them mutilated, and Deputy Roger Taylor along with Sheriff Buck Johnson have enough missing persons to make them suspicious this was no animal.  For the elder Evanses things begin looking like the Godawful Mess is starting again, and they must move to stop it before the police get in the way.  Meanwhile, Luna Evans’ life is turned upside down, she’s got a boyfriend who might be cheating on her, a mean girl bully, and a strange new crush who just moved into town, so she doesn’t have a lot of time for the family ghoul hunting business.

“Love is a kind of monster” in Bless Your Heart, a monster like the strigoi that never truly goes away, just goes dormant and festers.  Many characters spend a lifetime hiding their love, too fearful to act on it, others let it turn them bitter and hateful, others still get carried away and let teenage passion push them to take unnecessary risks and ignore caution that inevitably costs them and those dearest.  Love, like ghouls, will tear you apart.

The 90s are hip again, and the 00s are up next.  The retro 1999 setting is well realized in a way that feels like Ryan hopped in a time machine as it regularly reminded me of days forgotten.  Remember the Atkins diet?  Remember AOL chat rooms?  One character is late 90s teen ennui personified, Crane Campbell is the new kid in town with morbid fascinations who wears a black trench coat and listens to Type O-Negative.  He’s Christian Slater from Heathers transplanted into late 90s mall goth aesthetic.  The 1999 setting is never overused, nor does it become a cheap joke, but I’d like to have seen Ryan lean into it a little more heavily.

The Evans women and their undying support for each other despite life’s hardest challenges is the core of this novel.  Ducey is the stalwart of the family, the eldest of the Evans women, and my favorite of the characters in the book.  She’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer by way of Bea Arthur in The Golden Girls, her take no shit attitude and blunt retorts are the most fun I’ve had reading in a while.  Many of the blurbs praise the wit and banter, and I’d attribute about 90% of that to Ducey Evans.  She gets perhaps a little more time on the page than needed compared to the other Evanses, but I’m not complaining.  Lenore is Ducey’s daughter, and she has some unorthodox ideas about the power of the undead that clash with her mother’s black-and-white view of the world.  There is tension between Lenore and her daughter Grace as well, as Grace’s own daughter Luna is coming of age and she worries how she’ll handle the family secrets.  The supporting cast falls largely along archetypical lines, which has varying degrees of success. Luna’s best friend Dillon starts to feel like a 90s gay stereotype, a vessel to pour trauma in, which would be less offending if it felt like he had any agency.  Then again, what high-schooler does?  By and large, the character work is delightful, most of the massive cast is surprisingly complex and lifelike for what little time we spend with them.  Not every character has depth, and much of the teenage cast takes a hit in this regard, with their passages feeling less inspired than the rest.  Still, with all these voices Ryan juggles them with aplomb taking great care in making sure character paths cross as often as possible in multiple threads of time which has a way of making the town feel like it is shrinking as you read.

And it is shrinking, population-wise, that is.  Come for the small-town Hallmark family drama and stay for the slaughter.  Lindy Ryan has an undeniable gift for gore.  Don’t let the cute cover fool you, this book is an absolute bloodbath from the very first chapter to the very last.  As a veteran horror reader, I still found my stomach churning at the crimson rainbow Ryan paints with.  All five senses are utilized to bring the reader right up close to the unsightly acts of the strigoi, which if I haven’t yet mentioned, are as much zombie as they are vampire, and their rotting putrescence cannot be understated. 

The story is delivered in an alternating close third POV that affords the reader enough distance to dread the tension of a moment, but still gives Ryan room to deliver quite a few surprises.  This is the first of a planned series, which should be no shock to those who’ve finished the book, as there are plenty of loose ends and unanswered mysteries by the time we reach the final page, but the reader won’t feel deprived as the story is wrapped up with a satisfying and emotional climax.  I suppose the obvious comparison most will be reaching for is Grady Hendrix’s Southern Bookclub’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, but the two feel almost nothing alike.  Namely, the women in Ryan’s novel actually have control over their lives and take charge.  These are powerful women supporting each other rather than the victimized housewives of Hendrix’s novel.  There’s been a ton of buzz on the web about cozy horror, and I’m not really sure what the hell that means, but this book, despite the violence, gore, and walking, rotting corpses feels cozy.  Readers drawn to the cover might be surprised at how gruesome Bless Your Heart can be, but it’s ultimately a The ending is grim enough for horror but with a heavy dash of lighthearted winking that suggests that maybe things aren’t quite as bad as they seem.

By and large, the Bless Your Heart gave me the warm and fuzzies, as I felt I was reading something new but familiar that was in conversation with all the vampire tropes of the VHS–era without being completely beholden to them.  It’s a wonderful escapism that leans dark and bloody in all the right places.  It has that genre-bending feel and energy of a good comic book which makes it just a ton of fun to read.