Darling by Mercedes M Yardley
BlackSpot Books, 2022, POD trade pb
291pp, illustration motif throughout
ISBN: 978-1-64548-119-5
A Review by Gene Stewart
Superlative Southern Gothic, the best of its type I’ve ever read.
The physical volume is beautifully published. It has an evocative cover. It also includes shadowy chapter pages echoing an illustration at the frontispiece and just before the epilogue giving us a startling glimpse of the narrator. Eerie and restrained, the presentation shows care for quality.
Read in three sittings, this novel bowled me over. It’s Southern Gothic that’s brave, poignant, and compelling, featuring touchstones of poverty, special needs, and, at its core, radiant, uncompromising love.
By turns heart-wrenching, terrifying, and stunningly beautiful, it’s a story presented in elegant prose, concise phrasing, and telling detail. Nothing is shied away from, but nothing is dwelled-upon. People met are rounded, with good and bad qualities. Readers get precisely what’s needed to deliver the story to their own experiences.
MMY knows about people and small towns and, in Darling, she spills the bloody beans.
This brilliant book elevates Mercedes M Yardley into the ranks of Truman Capote, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Harper Lee. She stands beside contemporaries such as Toni Morrison and Gillian Flynn. An instant classic, Darling demonstrates writing mastery with a light if sardonic touch in a way all its own, delivered in an unmistakable voice. It’s serious fiction in popular idiom, engaging, entertaining, and ultimately valuable. You’ll likely be urging friends and family to read it. If this assessment seems hyperbolic, read Darling and see that it’s simply factual.
Genuine human horror rooted in realism, psychology, and dark shades of the supernatural offers a visceral tour of lives challenged, and ripped apart, by dark human impulses set loose oh so easily. Darling should win literary awards. A brief nod to the kind of rational explanation we tend to seek, whispered at the end, anchors it all in hackle-raising familiarity.
It’s a privilege to read such fine work.
Strongly recommended.
/ Gene Stewart
Bonus Interview with Mercedes “Miss Murder” Yardley –
https://www.facebook.com/aaronshourshow/videos/412942164248265/
