Search Worlds Without End

Since its earliest days, science fiction has explored the notion of a walking, talking, thinking machine, reflecting back our own humanity through their glass eyes, exploring their own humanity framed in the symmetry of programming and gears, trapped in a cage of synthetic flesh and metal bone. What happens when what we've made in our own image becomes more like us than we ever imagined? Robots in love. Robots at war. Robots who weep and dream. Robots who aspire to be on equal footing with their makers...or even possibly exceed us.

In Bless Your Mechanical Heart, Award-winning editor Jennifer Brozek brings together a team of writers, both new and established, to explore one of the most enduring archetypes in the science fiction genre with a tip of the hat to one of the most endearing and versatile phrases in Southern culture. Featuring stories by Peter Clines, Jody Lynn Nye, Seanan McGuire, Fiona Patton, Jean Rabe, Ken Scholes, and Lucy A. Snyder.

Rise and shine. The Evans women have some undead to kill.

It's 1999 in Southeast Texas and the Evans women, owners of the only funeral parlor in town, are keeping steady with... normal business. The dead die, you bury them. End of story. That's how Ducey Evans has done it for the last eighty years, and her progeny - Lenore the experimenter and Grace, Lenore's soft-hearted daughter, have run Evans Funeral Parlor for the last fifteen years without drama. Ever since That Godawful Mess that left two bodies in the ground and Grace raising her infant daughter Luna, alone.

But when town gossip Mina Jean Murphy's body is brought in for a regular burial and she rises from the dead instead, it's clear that the Strigoi - the original vampire - are back. And the Evans women are the ones who need to fight back to protect their town.

As more folks in town turn up dead and Deputy Roger Taylor begins asking way too many questions, Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and now Luna, must take up their blades and figure out who is behind the Strigoi's return. As the saying goes, what rises up, must go back down. But as unspoken secrets and revelations spill from the past into the present, the Evans family must face that sometimes, the dead aren't the only things you want to keep buried.

Making sure dead things stay buried is the family business...

For over a hundred years, the Evans women have kept the undead in their strange southeast Texas town from rising. But sometimes the dead rise too quick--and that's what left Lenore Evans, and her granddaughter Luna, burying Luna's mother, Grace, and Lenore's mother, Ducey. Now the only two women left in the Evans family, Luna and Lenore are left rudderless in the wake of the most Godawful Mess to date.

But when the full moon finds another victim, it's clear their trouble is far from over. Now Lenore, Luna, and the new sheriff - their biggest ally - must dig deep down into family lore to uncover what threatens everything they love most. The body count ticks up, the most unexpected dead will rise--forcing Lenore and Luna to face the possibility that the undead aren't the only monsters preying on their small town.