Author Lindy Ryan And The Vampiric Hold Of Beaumont

When the Columbine mass shooting happened, author Lindy Ryan was a teenager attending the same high school her mom had in Beaumont, Texas. Like a lot of goth and goth-adjacent kids, she and her friends found themselves subjected to death threats by people convinced they would be the next school shooters. Point of order: shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were just regular Nazis, and the idea that they were satanists targeting Christians is propaganda.

Regardless, scared people in Texas turned their suspicion on the spooky kids. Ryan remembers sitting in the principal’s office with several friends after yet another death threat. The principal put on the Interview with the Vampire soundtrack to soothe them, and another gory seed for her future career was planted.

Ryan’s latest book is Another Fine Mess, the sequel to last year’s Bless Your Heart, now out in paperback. The books tell the story of a matriarchal Evans clan, who operate a funeral home by day and a vampire slaying protocol at night. While the series is set in an unnamed town, the parallels to Beaumont, complete with that southeast Texas humidity, is apparent. 

“There is a typical morbid southern attitude,” she said in a phone interview, traces of her drawl nibbling on the edges of her words like a mosquito. “There’s this line in the book, ‘if you bury me in my brassiere, I will haunt you.’ My family said that exact thing. People in the rest of the country don’t react that way to jokes about death. Maybe it’s because we come from farmers and oilers and death is something we go hand in hand with.”

Making the Evans family a women-run funeral enterprise was important to Ryan. She comes from a long line of entrepreneurs and strong female role models in her family. Most of her characters are based on people from her household. For decades, men have dominated the death business, though that is definitely changing. In 2019, 72 percent of people enrolled in mortuary science programs were women, nearly twice the number who did so in 2007. It makes sense. Women tended the dead at least as far back as the Bible. 

“It might be unusual currently, but historically women ran funeral parlors before there even were funeral parlors,” Ryan said. “It’s just like midwifery. There’s this rush to reclaim the space they used to inhabit. I wanted to call attention to it because in too many areas women have lost their place.”

Both Bless Your Heart and Another Fine Mess revel in the down-home, cornbread-raised aspects of Southeast Texas. The series starts with an old man walking his land at night, just checking the fence line for anything that shouldn’t be there. It’s a path that many a Pawpaw has taken and sets a comfortable, yet ominous tone. Even just outside the cities of Texas, you’ll find coyotes and other things that are capable of killing. The Evans family just deals with the supernatural with the same weary physicality that they would any other threat. Whatever the opposite of cosmic horror is, this is it.

Part of that simply comes from a Texan’s relationship with death. Southeast Texas exploded with wealth when Spindletop struck oil, and then that wealth ran dry with the well. Over the last three decades, East Houston, Beaumont, and the rest of the region suffered increased mortality that comes with poverty, pollution, overwork, and lack of healthcare.

Ryan didn’t grow up in a mortuary, but she came to know death intimately through weekly trips to the cemetery. To this day, living in New York, she feels a twinge every Sunday that it’s time to go tend the family graves, keeping the dead restful in a much more figurative way than her protagonists do. 

“We were out at the sort of cemeteries you need a tractor to go to,” she said. “Stray dogs, crumbling stones, it was always a little scary, but you did it because it needed to be done. And I still get that twinge to do it, now. Beaumont? It’ll get its claws in you.” 

Both Bless Your Heart and Another Fine Mess are wonderful books for people who like some blood with their grits. Fans of Charlaine Harris will feel right at home. The thing that makes them remarkable, though, is way the story dances with the obligations and reality of death. It’s not just a tragedy, though it often is.

Ryan frames death as a duty. People need to be put to rest, her characters need to grieve and move on, and danger is just a part of life. The books have a very hard spine, the sort you would expect of a clan of women standing for themselves across generations in a male dominated field. Death is something we owe the world, and rest is something we owe the dead. Ryan makes sure readers remember that.

Another Fine Mess is out now in hardback