Another Fine Mess

The Evans Funeral Parlor has existed for almost as long as the Southeastern Texas town in which it's located. It is a generational business, overseen and passed down through the Evans women. There's Ducy, the family's current matriarch, who is the daughter of Pie, who mysteriously disappeared eighteen years ago. Ducy's daughter is Lenore. Lenore's daughter is Grace, who is the mother of the youngest Evans woman, seventeen-year-old Luna. The Evens Funeral Parlor offers all of the services you would expect: preparing the dead for interment, viewings, burials, and cremation. They can help their small town's residents make all of their final arrangements. They also provide a service that almost no one else in town knows about: they protect them from what the Evans women refer to as "the restless dead."

Bless Your Heart opens as the Evans prepare the body of a recently deceased woman for her viewing by doing her hair and make-up. When the dead woman starts talking and rises from her coffin, Ducey and Lenore, the two oldest members of the Evans clan, know that something is wrong. They haven't had any dealings with the undead in fifteen years, and that last encounter cost them dearly. As the body count grows, they realize that they must discover what is happening and how they can stop it.

In the second book in the series, Another Fine Mess, Ryan continues the story of the Evans women, who are attempting to recover from the events at the end of Bless Your Heart. They have buried, and are still mourning, their dead and trying to figure out a path forward, when a series of mutilated bodies begin to show up around town. It begins with small pets that go missing and progresses to livestock found dead and mutilated on local farms. Law enforcement is blaming the deaths on a near-extinct wolf that hasn't been seen in the area for years. But when people begin to be found, torn apart in a way that an animal would not, could not, do, the Evans women realize that they may be facing something they've never seen before.

In Bless Your Heart and Another Fine Mess, Lindy Ryan strikes a masterful balance between telling a story of a group of strong women living their lives in a small town and a horror story involving the creatures of the night. In addition, Ryan has created a wonderful cast of characters in the Evans women, who range in age from approaching 90 to seventeen, and provide a broad range of interests and perspectives, many of which clash in wonderful verbal jousting. In addition, each of the Evans women have secrets. Those they keep from their neighbors and friends, as well as those they keep from each other. Think of it as a variation on Steel Magnolias, only set in a funeral parlor and involving the "strigoi," a term from Romanian folklore which the Evans women use to refer to a type of zombie/vampire hybrid, with qualities of each.

Ryan's novels are inventive and filled with recognizable characters. Even if readers didn't grow up in the South, they will surely have known Southern women like the Evanses at some point in their lives! Ryan also demonstrates that she understands fully the idea that the best horror novels are liberally seasoned with humor.

The Evans women are very much like her debut novel's titular phrase, "bless your heart." On the surface, it can seem sweet and unassuming. Given just the right inflection when spoken, however, it can become a deadly weapon.

• Read an interview with the author here.