A Pain in the Neck

Bless Your Heart: A Novel
by Lindy Ryan

New York City: Minotaur Books, 2024.
298 pp. $28 Hardcover.

Reviewed by
Cheyanne Clagett

Mysterious disappearances, walking dead, and four generations of Southeast Texas women trying to prevent another “Godawful Mess”—Lindy Ryan’s debut novel Bless Your Heart delves into one small town’s descent into chaos when the dead begin to rise. Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and Luna Evans operate the Evans Funeral Parlor and, unbeknownst to the town, fight the undead whenever they threaten to rise against the living. Meanwhile, the three older women resist divulging family secrets to Luna, the youngest Evans at sixteen years old, whose role in the unfolding events is mysterious even to the wisest of them. Charming, energetic, and a little campy in the best way, Bless Your Heart focalizes a supernatural war between the living and dead through the struggles and triumphs of the Evans matriarchy. 

   The characterization of Ducey, the family’s octogenarian matriarch, is one of the novel’s best accomplishments. Of the four Evanses, Ducey has the strongest and most well-defined personality with her no-nonsense attitude and sharpened trocar for stabbing strigoi through the heart. When her daughter Lenore and granddaughter Grace try to ease great-granddaughter Luna into the family business too slowly for her liking, the narrator says, “Nobody wanted Ducey’s opinion on when to trim the begonias or how to get a bloodstain out of a blouse, but it was a different matter when it came time to bore the next generation with Evans family history.” Exasperated by her family and yet forgiving of their flaws, Ducey does her best to prepare Luna for her part in the Evans legacy. However, despite her bluntness and impatience, Ducey is secretly more tender than she appears. Mid-way through the novel, the readers enter her bedroom for the first time, and the narrator describes how “Ducey clicked her dentures and flipped to a new page, skimming until she found a paragraph spicy enough to bother reading. Her eyes caught the word ‘throbbing’ and held on for dear life. ‘Oh, hush,’ she said... ‘I may be old, but I ain’t dead yet.’” Laced with pragmatism and dry humor, Ducey’s point-of-view chapters bring together the novel’s best qualities and are a treat to read. 

   The book’s strongest moments by far are when all four Evans women are in the room together, often bickering, occasionally reminiscing. The conversations between them crackle with energy because the relationships feel lived-in, loaded with decades of shared experience and secrets. In most of these scenes, the novel aligns Ducey with her great-granddaughter Luna, probably because Luna takes after Ducey’s no-nonsense approach to the town’s strange happenings. When Luna first witnesses a Strigoi killed, Ducey notes to herself, “The girl was sucking down gulps of tap water like it was going out of style, but she was still standing. Good sign.” Soon after as Luna finally learns the family’s lore and correctly guesses that a recent burial was also a restless dead, the narrator says, “Ducey hid a smile inside another sip. Her great-granddaughter might have been scared as all get-out, but she was quick on her feet.” Meanwhile, the relationship between Lenore (second generation) and Grace (third) bristles with unspoken regret and shame over the resolution of the first “Godawful Mess” fifteen prior. While discussing the rapid rise of strigoi and the need for urgent action, the narrator observes, “Grace’s body had curled in on itself with each of her mother’s words. By the time Lenore went quiet, Grace felt like origami, a sheet of paper bent and folded until it took on another shape entirely.” Grace blames herself for the escalating situation despite her efforts to correct it, and Lenore refuses to acknowledge her or alleviate her false sense of guilt. These complicated inter-generational relationships are the heart of the novel and make it worth reading. 

   Despite the promising characters and premise, the novel feels unaware of its potential as it stretches out secrets and major plot points to create a big reveal instead of letting the narrative escalate naturally. Since the publisher has confirmed that Bless Your Heart is the first book of the series, one could speculate that the novel was originally intended to be a standalone but was drawn out to accommodate multiple volumes. Whether or not this was the case, Bless Your Heart works so hard to withhold two key pieces of information—what the “Godawful Mess” was and how Luna is connected to the restless dead—that it foreshadows revelations too often, making the plot twist predictable. As a result, the novel’s initial suspense exhausts itself, leaving the Evanses’ voices to carry a story that tries and fails to rely on genre conventions like a dramatic reveal or plot twist.  

  Although hampered by repetition and predictability, Bless Your Heart is a charming, funny novel about finding one’s place in the family business and living with generations of strong, stubborn, Texan women. These characters may not compensate entirely for the novel’s formal issues, but they are certainly memorable and worth experiencing. With these well-defined characters and a sharp wit, the novel is a quick, enjoyable read, especially for fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural.

^{Cheyanne Clagett is a third-year M.F.A. fiction student and the Editorial Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Southwest.}