It’s day three of Minotaur Debut Week, and we are thrilled to be introducing some big-hearted characters and blood-soaked Southern charm in Lindy Ryan’s delightful mystery-horror BLESS YOUR HEART.
Dive into this story about four generations of women tasked with battling a vampire to protect their town. Check out everything Lindy Ryan has to say in today’s author Q+A and letter to librarians!
BLESS YOUR HEART is available for download on Edelweiss and NetGalley. LibraryReads votes due by March 1st.
Where is your local library? How have libraries played a role in your reading life?
I’ve recently relocated and am still getting to know my new local library (Brunswick County Library in Carolina Shores, NC), but libraries hold a very special place in my heart—like they probably do for most readers (and writers)! I grew up scouring the children’s sections of my hometown libraries in Beaumont, TX (mostly RC Miller Memorial Library, but I have fond memories of the downstairs children’s section in the Main Downtown branch too); I discovered my love of thrillers in Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor, ME; I outlined a novel in Cannon Beach Library in Cannon Beach, Oregon; I practically lived (and even briefly worked) in East Brunswick Public Library in East Brunswick, NJ; and I wrote a substantial portion of BLESS YOUR HEART’s first draft inside the Valley Branch of the Juneau Public Library in Juneau, AK.
All this to say: libraries are incredibly special places, and librarians, uniquely wonderful people. They are havens for readers, sanctuaries for writers, and homes for all book lovers.
What’s on your TBR right now?
Oh, goodness. As author-in-residence for Rue Morgue I read a good number of upcoming titles and look forward to diving into Richard Chizmar’s BECOMING THE BOOGEYMAN (October 2023) and Christina Henry’s GOOD GIRLS DON’T DIE (November 2023) as soon as I wrap up Chuck Palahniuk’s NOT FOREVER, BUT FOR NOW (September 2023). I’m also doing some research reading for the sequel to BLESS YOUR HEART—including several titles from Todd Harra and Ken McKenzie, Caitlin Doughty, and a re-read of Mary Roach’s STIFF—and some back-reading to support students I mentor in Western Connecticut State University’s MFA program: TENDER IS THE FLESH by Agustina Bazterrica and SLEWFOOT by Brom.
There’s more. So many more. If your TBR isn’t stacked so high that you’re in danger of being buried under toppling books, then you’re doing it wrong!
Tell us about your writing process.
I’m a total panster playing at plotster—meaning sometimes my characters have better ideas, despite my best laid plans. I typically write a few thousand words at a time, and always either super early in the morning or very late at night (which is often about the same time), never in the middle of the day, and never without a fresh cup of coffee or tea. I’m an academic, so I tend to spend a lot of time in research while I’m writing, and I struggle with attention and anxiety issues which causes me to become very “method” in my craft—visual, auditory, and other sensory clues help me immerse myself in my stories and characters, whether that means listening to a specific type of music, playing an inspiring movie on low volume in the background, or visiting a certain place to help get—and stay—in the right headspace. More practically, I do have a robust outlining process that starts high-level and becomes more granular as I go, and this helps me keep track of twists and turns as I write.
Ultimately, I think the writing process is unique to each writer and may even fluctuate between books—it certainly does for me—and that’s okay.
Who’s your favorite character in literature?
My favorite character in literature has always been—and likely will always be—Lestat de Lioncourt of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. I first met Lestat at fourteen when I discovered my true love of dark literature. After being raised on a diet of R. L. Stine, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stephen King—all wonderful, of course—discovering that women can write spooky stuff too was a defining moment for me.
Lestat is many things: he’s charismatic, arrogant, charming, materialistic, generous, vain, visionary, onery—every bit, every bite, the brat prince of Rice’s vampire world. But what I love most about Lestat is that he is multi-dimensional. He’s hopelessly flawed, and he has this uncanny dexterity in both acknowledging that fact and ignoring it to his advantage. He’s a character to love and fear in equal measure: unpredictable and a bit of a tyrant, but also extremely loyal and passionate. He also happens to be incredibly stubborn, and therefore, extremely relatable.
Can you describe your novel in five sentences?
I can do it in one: BLESS YOUR HEART is an autobiography wherein everything that happens is both completely true and totally false.
Really, it’s a story about four generations of women (inspired by my great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and teenage self) who run a funeral parlor, and the lengths they’ll go to to protect their town and one of their own—even if she happens to be a monster. Set in late summer 1999, life goes on as it always has in rural Southeast Texas, and for generations, the Evans women have taken care of laying the town’s residents to rest at Evans Funeral Parlor. Occasionally, one of the quiet rural community’s dead become restless, and it’s the Evanses’ job to put them back in their grave. But this summer has been especially hot, and the dead have begun to rise, ripping the peace—and the throats—out of the town. A dead woman’s tongue, a missing dog, and a strange newcomer are the only clues law enforcement has to sort out the hell that has been unleashed on their small town—even when all tracks lead back to the Evans women. (That’s five!)
Dear Librarians,
I know we deal in words but allow me to paint you a picture.
It’s summer 1999, August in rural Southeast Texas. It’s hot out—so damn hot that you begin to melt every time you step into the sun—that you barely notice what’s going on in the world outside of your small town. In these dog days of summer, your makeup smears, your hairspray runs, your leather driver’s seat cushion is enough to scald the backs of your bare legs—but it’s not the heat you’re concerned about. It’s the roses. Your late husband, the man you loved so much that you still grieve his early death every single day, he planted a white rosebush in the edge gardens of your family business, and under it you buried your biggest, darkest, most fateful family secret. You’ve kept this secret, this rosebush, for fifteen years. Always feeding, always festering, always worrying about the day that proverbial—or maybe literal—skeleton claws its way out from the dirt.
Then one day a dead woman rises in your family’s funeral parlor, and you know exactly why the roses on your dead husband’s bush have begun to rot—and it’s got nothing to do with the heat.
It’s got everything to do with you and that long-buried secret.
The events of BLESS YOUR HEART are fiction, but the women who bear them—who fight, who survive, who endure—are not. The Evans women are my family. They are me. And they exist, in many ways, because of librarians.
Much like Luna Evans, I was a loner in high school. Before high school, too, and after. I grew up in the shadows and secrets of the women who came before me, and when things got to be too much, too hot, at home, I sought sanctuary in the bookshelves of my local library. It was a librarian who first introduced me to Betty MacDonald and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and later to R. L. Stine and Goosebumps. It was a librarian to whom I showed my flea-market copy of Interview with the Vampire, and who guided me to the horror section—to women like Anne Rice and Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson and Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris.
It was librarians who taught me that little girls can love horror. Can read horror. Can write horror.
Can heal from horror.
It was a librarian who, after the deaths of my great-grandmother and grandmother, during the throes of some of the worst years of my mother’s ongoing chronic illness, encouraged me to take all that pain, all that grief, all that love, and write about it. “Put it on the page,” she said. Pour it out and give it back, she meant. Because when you do that, it never really ends, does it, that story? It gets to live forever in the hearts and hands of readers. Like the restless dead, it becomes immortal. It lives on.
BLESS YOUR HEART began as an exercise—or maybe an exorcism—to say goodbye to the women I loved most. A way to bring them back to life on the page, hear their voices again, and give them different endings. And not just my grandmothers, but my friends, those kids who, like me, were too different to fit into the confines of their small towns. Those beautiful boys and girls who grew up scared to be themselves in small minds. Who, unlike me, never left. Whose stories, like the Evanses’, refuse to stay buried.
Ultimately, despite its horror, its gore, its sometimes tongue-in-cheek and other times biting commentary on growing up in a small Southern town at the turn of the century, BLESS YOUR HEART is a story about the power of motherly love. Of the strength of family, the fallacy of legacy, and the lengths to which women will go to protect one of their own—even if she might be a monster.
Even if she is.
I hope this book does my grandmothers and mother proud. I hope that one day a young woman will walk into a library, and, “Bless her heart,” a librarian will say, “I know just what she needs.” And whether it’s my book or one of innumerable others, that librarian will have one the right one in hand. Because it’s not just books, not just words on paper that librarians give to a young reader, or a mourning writer. It’s hope—and what is a more beautiful gift than a ray of hope bright enough to cut through the dark?
Bless your heart.
Lindy Ryan
BLESS YOUR HEART by Lindy Ryan; 9781250888884; 4/9/24
The owner of this website has made a commitment to accessibility and inclusion, please report any problems that you encounter using the contact form on this website. This site uses the WP ADA Compliance Check plugin to enhance accessibility.
