Horror thriller. The book sounded great. The set up sounded like it was going to be spooky edge of your seat type book. I found neither. It was OK when I was reading it in the beginning. I had hope. There’s a lot of things in the story that leave you hanging. Certainly is unfinished

I snagged this ARC from @netgalley. I thought this would be great since Yardley is highly praised as a horror writer, however, I felt the book did not match the author’s hype. The concept of a town of horrors with frequent children disappearing was interesting, but I found the characters fell flat. Although I got a hint of their personalities, they all felt like they were shells of the people they were meant to be. I liked that she showed how cruel society can be towards a single mother, especially one with a special needs child, but I could not really empathize with the characters. I felt like the main issue with the town (will not further explain due to spoilers) could have also been fleshed out more, as it doesn’t really add substance to the story as it is. Overall, I was intrigued but disappointed.

Mercedes Yardley writing has always been dream-like, strange, and alluring. Darling was no exception. While horrible things to happen, Yardley’s unique style allows you to see behind the horror – the reactions, the normalcy of certain things – all while at the edge of your seat waiting to see what happens. I do think Darlings would have benefited with a shorter page count, but I still love this story.

Creepy atmosphere which I enjoyed throughout, great characters, brilliant read. Really want to read more from this author.

Darling follows a mother named Cherry, or Cherise as she likes to be called. At sixteen, Cherry is married, knocked up and leaving home. Her husband leaves her due to having a special needs child. Years go by and Cherry now has a two year old daughter as well. Cherry recieves a phone call that her abusive mother has died and left the house to her. Everything, including utilities have been payed up for the next five years. Cherry and her children move back to her childhood home.
This book made no sense to me. The characters had no sense themselves. This was just a no for me.

Trigger warning: too many to list.
Darling, by Mercedes M Yardley, is one heck of a creepy and sad supernatural thriller/horror that leaves you hanging at the end. Cliff hangers are one of my biggest pet peeves and this one has a doozy. The first half of the story was good because you start getting to know, Cherry, the main character and her children, Jonah and Daisy, and you start to root for them. But the 2nd half was all over the place and didn't make a lot of sense. I guess because the town starts getting to her, the main character starts making bad decisions, while seeming to acknowledge that they're bad. I sort of agree with another reviewer that Jonah was basically just a prop. You never learn his actual diagnosis and there wasn't even a hint of Cherry trying to get him any of the state/county services, including public school, that all special needs children are entitled to.

Wow. First time reading Mercedes Yardley, and really enjoyed this book. Great characters, great pacing, great story. Will need to read more from her. #Darling #NetGalley

Darling was a book that I wanted to understand but could never ever understand what was going on. What was wrong with Darling? What happened to make it be the way it was whatever that was? It started out well, but the more I read, the more confused I was. By the end nothing made any sense and I still don’t understand it. That’s really sad too because it could have really been a great read, but enough wasn’t put into it for others to understand what exactly was going on in this town. Thank you to #NetGalley and the publishers and author for the opportunity to read and review #Darling with my honest thoughts and opinions.

Cherry left Darling, Louisiana at. The age of 1 years. Se was unwed and pregnant. En her mother dies, she feels forced to go back home. She and hr two children more into her childhood home. The walls are whispering and something scary scurries across the roof at night. Unannounced, men come the following morning planning on moving in the furniture for Cherry. Someone brings groceries as they know she came in on late to go shopping. Darling is a small community wher everyone now’s everyone. Some how daughters are missing and not found. Now her daughter is missing. Will Cherry find her?

This novel is motherhood in a gothic setting. There is fear and the loss of hope in the novel. The reader sees the struggles Cherry has because she doesn’t want to be there. Th e mstery was the part I liked the most. It's creepy at times. It’s a story of being a single mother with two kids that is different.

Unfortunately the book was archived before I had chance to download and read it so I am unable to write a review.

This was a creepy tale of small town spookiness. I enjoyed it very much. I will read anything this author writes.

Darling was an okay story. The synopsis provided definitely had me interested in this book. It was kind of frustrating to read because the characters are not well developed, and then there's a weird love triangle situation in the story when the mom's daughter has been abducted. That was a little weird for me because who is trying to have a romance when their kid is missing.

Cherry Larouche escaped her abusive mother and claustrophobic hometown of Darling, Louisiana with her high school sweetheart and to be ex when she was 16. Now years later she and her two children Jonah and Daisy are forced to return to her childhood home after her mother's death, where she imagines whispers in the walls and hears sinister skittering across the roof at night. While being made to face the monsters of her past, she must also face a new monster haunting the town. Children are being found murdered by a beast known as the "Handsome Butcher". When Cherry's own daughter turns up missing, she must fight to find her daughter and escape from the true evil infecting the town.

Book Trigger Warnings:
-Murder
- Serial Killer
-Child Death
- The R-slur
- Physical Abuse
-Sexual Abuse
-Sexual Assault
-Incest

**I received this book for free from Netgalley for the purpose of an honest review.**

**Some spoilers**

I want to start this review by saying once I started this book I couldn't put it down until I had finished it. The story of a struggling single mother doing whatever it took to take care of her children and the southern gothic vibes the author imbued into the story pulled me in and didn't let me go. I felt Cherry's anxiety at returning to a place she tried so hard to escape along with her fear and despair when Daisy went missing.

That being said there were some aspects of the writing and plot that pulled me out of the story.

The first one-half to two-thirds of the story were well paced, with just a few sections feeling like they needed more information. The book has very short chapters (with multiple chapters being only a page long), some new chapters jump around enough where I was checking to make sure I hadn't missed pages somehow.

The sense of time is very off in this book. For the first bit after Daisy goes missing Yardley is clear that it has only been 4 days since the disappearance, but after that it gets muddled with Cherry reacting to situations in a way that makes it feel like Daisy has been gone for much longer than she has. For example, for a character who talks up and down about how much she loves her children and would do anything for them, she seems to move past Daisy's disappearance very quickly and into a love triangle with her childhood friend Runner and her brother-in-law Mordachi. Within days of her daughter being seemingly abducted by a serial killer she is falling in love, waking up next to her lover and talking about how she has fresh bread and is going to make him and Jonah French toast.

Jonah, who is disabled seems to be in the story mostly as a prop, he is used as a reassurance to Cherry that there is someone who will always love and need her when lovers abandon her. Multiple times in the story she leaves her son with strangers (one a child themselves) even though she knows her abusive ex, Jonah's father is in town and looking for them.

The incest plot point feels entirely pointless and does nothing for the story, nor is it really brought up again apart from Cherry thinking about it and doing nothing with the information.

The last 10% of the book goes from 0-100 and definitely feels rushed. The "infection" of the townsfolk by the evil of the town is shown through a couple of isolated incidents of a murder and a few fights around town. There is no explanation of what this evil is or why it infects the town. From dialogue with another character Cherry finds out a similar infection happened in the town decades earlier, but it is never explored beyond that.

All in all, even with these issues I did enjoy reading Darling, so I am giving it 3 stars out of 5. If you decide to read it, just be aware of the trigger warnings for the book as it does deal with some sensitive topics.

This review is also included on goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4680296330
This review is also included on my personal blog: https://literarynightowl.wordpress.com/2022/04/22/horrors-only-understand-horror/

As a pregnant teenager, Cherry/Cerise left her hometown of Darling with her lover Ephraim; vowing never to return. However, she finds herself returning several years later when her mother dies and wills her the family house. This is a deal she cannot pass up: Ephraim left her once their child—Jonah--was born with a genetic disorder. She is destitute and now has a second child to take care of: Daisy, whose father is unknown due to Cherry/Cerise having unprotected sex with her male clients when she prostitutes herself to make ends meet.

This may sound like the makings of a damsel-in-distress book: a young-women in need of a strong man to protect her and offer some romance. But then, it wants to also be an anti-damsel-in-distress book: a strong woman in peril who doesn’t want or need a strong man to protect her (romance is possible). As Cherry/Cerise navigates the threats to her family both imagined (supernatural?) and real, she waffles between these architypes—and two men--repeatedly spewing how she will always protect and love her kids. However, her behavior and actions are so antithetical to what she professes.

This may be explained by how she describes herself based on her name. She imagines Cherry as a happy person who see the world as being beautiful. This is the name the people of Darling use. Conversely, Cerise is someone who has always struggled; she has been abused, hurt, and deprived. This is the name she used when she left Darling, and the one she initially insists the Darlingites call her. But old habits die hard, for the townsfolk see and treat her as the golden child they knew before while also holding a grudge against her for taking Ephraim and leaving them behind.

There are too many plot holes and issues in this book for me to ignore and give it a higher rating. For example, after Daisy disappears, she Cherry/Cerise often leaves her disabled son alone in the car on several occasions. Not only is there an unknown child abductor out there, but her nonverbal son is experiencing the trauma of being separated from her. She also allows a new lover to spend nights in the home; a man who treats her son with distain.

Then there is the creepy scene at the end when she goes to the prison to speak to Ephraim’s father hoping to get some answers that may help find her daughter. She is very anxious and angry as he acts menacingly towards her. However, when he gives her the most disgusting information—which affects her—she is nonplussed.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Black Spot Books for the opportunity to read and review this book.

The first half / two-thirds of this book reads like a thriller. Cerise, a destitute single-mom of two, goes back to her hometown to take possession of a house she never wanted to see again, after the death of her estranged mother. Without giving spoilers, there's personal drama and tragedies, something unspoken about the house, and local-area missing kids are showing up dead. There's hints of strangeness, but vague enough to make you question whether its precognition, spirits or simply coincidence.

I point this out because for this huge portion of the book, there's nothing definitively supernatural-- just occasional hints of possibility. So you think you're reading a contemporary thriller.

And then all of a sudden, everything pivots. Everything. A madness, a gore-thirsty evil that sublimates the house, the town.

I did not enjoy the scene with Mordachi's father. I feel like it was done to add an extra touch of repugnance and wrongness -- but wasn't necessary, and added nothing to the story. I also felt that the explanation about Jonah is just horrible; so the representation of disability in this book is boiled down to a nasty old stereotype.

After finishing the book, I feel like I was lured in by reading most of a good story only to have it switched out to one made up of cheap thrills, violence and gore. Don't get me wrong - I love violence and gore in my reading. But not when it's "Gore for the sake of gore".

For me, the first 70% of this book is a strong 3 to 3.5 stars. The last 30% is a 1.5 at a stretch.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the chance to read this book!

Following a single mother who, down on her luck and with no family or friends to speak of, is forced to return to the hometown she fled as a teenager - this thriller pits a hard scrap mother against the terrors of motherhood and small towns. With a reputation for being the most desirable girl in town, she has enough men clambering for her attention but she only has eyes for her two children. Her darlings. And when one goes missing she will turn over the entire world to get that child back.

This was not the small town infected with evil story I was expecting. It was much more ambiguous, and I wasn't really sure whether there was something paranormal in nature affecting the town, or if it was all down to Cherry's childhood trauma. And there was just so much thrown in to his book besides the horror angle. Down on her luck mom just trying to do right by her kids returns to her childhood home where everyone falls all over themself with glee, there's a weird out of place romantic love triangle, there's a serial killer on the loose and her daughter goes missing.... it's a lot. It was a little too scattered for me.

The story is clear building anticipation. The use of flashbacks also made me love this book. It helped in understanding how blind Cerise chose to be and how strong a heart Mordachi had.

This was a good read! I loved Yardley's writing and I definitely did not expect the ending. I'm not really too keen on the romance aspect of the story though, but that's just me.

The story follows Cherry LaRouche as she re-enters the town of Darling after she escaped its clutches years previously.
Darling has evil inhibiting it and as bodies of children start to be uncovered the tension grows with it. Mercedes managed to make me feel intense and completely creeped out throughout, which is exactly what I had hoped would happen from reading the blurb.
The book didn't have me truly hooked until chapter 6 and then I couldn't put it down. The story flowed fantastically and had me gripped until the end. I was rooting for Cherry the whole time due to her fighting spirit and battles against her own anxieties. Fantastic book and I will be recommending it to all I know.
Thank you to Black Spot Books and NetGalley for an eARC copy of this book for an honest review.