The concept behind this book promised an enjoyable read, and it even left room for a potential series based on how it concluded. However, I have to confess some reservations about diving further into it. The story's abundance of perspectives left me a tad disoriented, with moments where I found it challenging to keep track of the characters, particularly the different Evans women. On the bright side, I did manage to unravel the twist approximately halfway through, and it turned out to be a rather gratifying revelation!

I was very excited to read Bless Your Heart. This southern vampire story sparked my interest. With a small town environment, a police force that has history with our main characters, dead that won't stay dead, as well as some teenage drama, this one has it all. I loved the Evans family who are our main characters., four generations of Evans women running a funeral parlor and having a secret.

As the story unfolds the author allows us to meet and get to know people who eventually become victims made me all the more invested in the story. I was kept guessing as to how what was going on and especially, what happened 15 years ago that is a pivotal moment in the Evans family.

This story has some pretty gruesome attacks, but are primarily fade to black and the details being conveyed in part by the police reactions to what they are seeing. This gives quite a macabre feel still. The author gives the reader lighter moments as we learn the events of the past but there is always and underlying urgency in place.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced reader copy. This is my honest review.

I liked the concept of this book as a southern perspective of a campy story about the undead, or "restless dead" in this case. I was really enjoying it for the first 2/3 or so of the book but the last third became a little convoluted. It seemed like there was too much story left to wrap up in such a short period.

I would say it's worth a shot if you like light hearted looks at a topic that is usually reserved for horror books and films and are looking for some fun for the beach, poolside or on a plane.

Looking for a quick, gruesome, multi-generational family tale of keeping the dead from rising? Look no further. The Evan's women has been keeping a very close eye on the dead and keeping them from rising ever since that Godawful Mess 15 years ago.. But when a body- or what was left of it- turns up in their small town, they know it's the beginning of something bigger: it's starting again. They will tell you it's starting again at the end of almost every chapter, as well as how they need to tell their youngest family member, Luna, about the truth. It will take many, many chapters for them to actually do that. While the constant not doing anything is taking place, you are learning about the quirks of the family- Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and Luna, as well as members of the sheriff's office in their small town. Most of the officers have been in love with an Evan's woman at some point. But the Godawful Mess kind of ruined things for them. The outcasts of the town, with the only funeral home in town, they are given wide berth.
This is more plot driven, without the plot moving that quickly- but the body count adds up and the gruesome discoveries of the bodies will keep lovers of gore in their element.
One other reviewer stated how the Evan's family reminded them of the Owen's family- the witches from Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic series. And they do, in a way, with their family banter about killing the undead almost a topic of daily conversation over breakfast. Less margarita's though. Shame.
This is an easy read if you are looking to sit and lose yourself for an afternoon and not get too invested in writing style- enjoyable characters, adequate gruesome kill scenes, and a satisfying ending (which I called at the very beginning.)
Out April 9, 2024.

This was such a fun read! It gave me major Grady Hendrix vibes - a perfect blend of humor, horror, and mystery-thriller. I was immediately drawn into the story. The fast-pacing kept things super engaging and I never wanted to put it down. It really flew by - I could stayed in this world for longer and already am craving a sequel!

I loved how this wasn't your traditional take on vampires. The strigoi were much more complicated than that, and not being familiar with their mythology wasn't a hinderance at all. Such a unique story! The family history was super interesting as well, and I especially loved getting to know each of the Evans women. Talk about strong female leads! The sense of family, protection, and love was so strong. It was so easy to root for them.

Great writing all around - the descriptions of those gory and horrific moments were really well done. So fun to flip between sharp and witty dialogue and those really disgusting death scenes. And the messages woven in throughout with the teens of being yourself and sticking up for your friends and what you believe in was really lovely - nothing felt preachy. It all felt real.

I will say that sometimes the multiple POVs became a bit too much for me. At times, I would have liked to stay with one character for longer. It was never confusing jumping back and forth between people but I didn't always feel the need for it.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the advanced copy!

Such a fun story! I had no idea it would be a little creepy though so glad I read it during the day!

The story picked up fast, slowed in the middle, and then had a perfect end!

Let me start by saying that if you go off the cover of this book you’ll be pleasantly surprised that this is more than just some vampire book. I read book synopsis very quickly and I assumed this would be a southern vampire story. But it contains so much more complex ideas.

I was immediately drawn to the idea of Steel Magnolias meets Dracula meets Night of the Living Dead. But be aware, this is not a vampire or zombie story. It’s a new monster birthed by Lindy Ryan.

The story starts like all the great, fun horror films. A quiet town where everyone knows each other and the gossip starts soon as you turn your back. With each chapter more and more gore is spilled until the town and its people are almost unrecognizable.

I love the Evans women and their quirky family. I love that they run the local funeral parlor because I always wanted to work at one. Each woman is strong and unique with their own wants and needs. How amazing is it to have a household with four generations of women?! Luna, despite the nightmares and eventually chaos, is a lucky girl!

The story actually reminded me more of Practical Magic. A bad man leading a woman astray. A family considered weird by a small town community. And everyone having to work together to protect their loved ones. Also, bad guy buried under roses and midnight margaritas.

I could see this being a series and I’m not sure if that has been expressed by the author but I definitely would read more in this world and by the author.

I highly recommend checking out Bless Your Heart if you enjoy unique horror books/films that make their own rules and have fun doing it. Thank you to NetGalley, Lindy Ryan, and Minotaur books for the opportunity to read Bless Your Heart. I have written this review voluntarily.

I was excited to read Bless Your Heart by Lindy Ryan. I'm a big fan of humorous horror and this title looked to be right up my alley. This is a fun read with lots of gross descriptions of mayhem and plenty of southern charm.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this digital ARC.

The story takes place in a small town in Texas in the 1990s. I loved the setting. The collection of southern sayings was so spot on. Growing up in the south, I had heard so many of these sayings and I could really hear the accent in the characters dialogue. I felt like the mystery and intrigue of what was going on in the story kept a good pace. However, I did not realize there was going to be so much gore. It made me a little nauseous and green around the gills. I did like that the author killed off so many characters and SO glad about Belle. I was like NOOOO when she got snatched off the porch so I’m glad she made it out. Especially with the ending. That was so insane! I loved that Crane wasn’t the person who started it all. I felt like it would’ve been cheap if it was. Still I didn’t like how suspicious Crane was. I liked the grand reveal of Luna being the one who started the whole thing. I was also very scared that Luna would get her friends involved and I’m glad she left them out of it. Overall a really great book and so glad I read it! Not sure I could whole heartedly recommend it to my audiences due to the gore.

It's Texas in the late 90's and Lindy Ryan has introduced us to the Evans women,- Ducy, Eleanor and Grace.
Through a quirky and light intro we learn that the Evanses operate a funeral home. The book takes a sharp left turn when we learn that sometimes the dead that are buried in the town don't stay dead and buried.
Introducing Strigoi, an original vampires, connected to their family in some way and wrecking havoc in the town.

There is gore, humor, complex and interesting relationships and fully filled out characters that will keep you engaged and wishing for more books in the series! If you loved the Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires this is definitely a book for you!
#Blessyourheart #lindyryan #stmartins

There is nothing better than a Fun, Unique, Witty, Sarcastic, and Spooky read, and this book has all of that!

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!