An heart wrenching American Gothic for lovers of Michael McDowell's works. In this thrilling tale, Cherry returns to her childhood hometown with her kids in tow and her guard up high. It’s a hometown full of nosey old friends and acquaintances who ask inappropriate questions about her special need son and long gone husband. She’s hesitant to accept help from friendly neighbours, but when tragedy strikes, she regrets not doing so. The town protects their own, as Cherry reminds them. She can only hope that motto is true.

Sometimes you can go home again. But should you?

First before I get into anything, I wanted to thank NetGalley for the ARC.

Darling, Louisiana. A town everyone is trying to escape. Cherry was luckily able to get out at the tender age of sixteen, but whenever her estranged mother passes away and leaves the home Cherry grew up in behind and left to Cherry and Cherry only, the young mother of two is drug back into a town full of mystery and chaos.

Trigger warnings for this one: child murder, assault, child abuse

I really enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought I was going to, there was a lot I wasn’t expecting and the very end of this one gets extremely violent extremely fast. I was very engrossed in the story of Cherry’s struggles and how she was going to overcome everything that was unfairly tossed her way. I feel like everyone she loved and trusted turned on her in one way or another, and you don’t really know if what is happening around her is just a form of PTSD, or are these things really going on? This was a fun, fast and thrilling ride that I was never bored with. This is my first time reading any of Ms. Yardley’s work and I cannot wait to pick up more.

This was very slow at first. Then explodes at the end.
Small town girl gets out with HS sweetheart.
Becomes pregnant with a disabled child.
Father want to kill child, leaves mother. She figures out how to survive.
Her mother passes and leaves her the house paid in full.
She has no choice to return to the small town
Small town drama
Many childrens bodies keep being found
Left similar to dolls. Some missing limbs.
Small town girls daughter disappears

The end reveals what the town is hiding

When Cherry is suddenly called home, she thinks she is making a mistake. She should have followed her instincts. Due to her current living situation, she has to take the offer of her dead mother’s home. Her homecoming is just like she thought. Some people were ok to see her return, others wanted to know why she returned. From day one, she has trouble with people. The town begins to have children go missing and everyone starts to be on edge. When her daughter is taken, things begin to spiral out of control quickly. The townspeople begin to unwind and Cherry realizes that she should never have returned.

I absolutely loved this book! There were all the elements I love about a book. If you enjoy horror, supernatural and serial killers; then this is for you.

I really liked this book, I thought it had a good pace to it and it definitely kept me guessing the whole time!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I had a hard time deciding on a star rating on this book. First of all, you need to know that this book was disturbing. I had a hard time putting it down when it was time for bed.

Cherry "Cerise" escaped her past when she fled the small Louisiana town of Darling when she was a teenager with her boyfriend, E. Years later, E is gone, having abandoned Cerise with their son, Jonah because Jonah was born on the spectrum. Now Cerise also has a daughter, Daisy, and she is behind on her bills and rent. When a call from a lawyer advises her she has inherited her mother's house, who has died, Cerise is glad her childhood tormentor is no more and asks the lawyer to sell the house. The lawyer advised of a clause her mother stipulated in the will, advising that the house could not be sold for a certain amount of time.

Running out of time and options, Cerise takes her two children and moves back into the home where she spent her nightmarish childhood.

This had all the makings for an incredible story, and it was riveting and captivating. However, the author didn't seem to know which way she wanted to go. Was the land of the town itself haunted? Was it evil? Or was it the house? Or was it just her mother?

When Daisy disappears, there is another shift in the atmosphere, this time with a flesh and blood monster.

The town, the characters, it was all believable. I just wish the author had defined her monster to herself before writing this because, despite all of its qualities, the lack of continuity of the evil was too much to overlook.

3 out of 5 stars.

This was the first time reading anything by Mercedes M. Yardley and after finishing "Darling" I'm not sure I can see myself reading another book of hers.
The book started off pretty good and I was enjoying the story and the writing. At the beginning of the book there were many descriptions I loved and Cherry was a really great character. About 15% or so into the book I started coming across awkward sentences and the writing started getting too "flowery."
Soon, the excessive use of character eye descriptions became torturous. "Her eyes flashed," "His eyes narrowed," "His glowing green eyes also caught the light of the Lousiana sky," "His eyes flashed," "His eyes were glass suns, intense enough to annihilate her. Sheer immolation." This is all just from one page. I found myself wishing the man's eyes had the power to annihilate Cherry just so the story would end.
This kind of thing happened for the entire book, which was distracting. "Pigtails like banners," "her white hands," "his bony body." Like, we get it. Please come up with something new instead of using the same phrases over and over.
I can't imagine myself recommending this book to anyone.
Thank you to NetGalley and Black Spot Books for the DRC.

This is one of those books where you spend the whole time reading it and shaking your head and saying "WHAT" not because of surprises in the plot but because everything from characters to descriptions of places to dialogue seems to have been written without any regard for common sense or reality or any checks or balances on the "would this person do this" or the "how does this make sense" scales. It's a mess, and a poorly written mess, and is an excellent example for the need for developmental editing in fiction.

Beautifully written but confusing at times. Was it paranormal or just cherry’s traumatized mind. The last few chapters were an explosion of violence and deeply dark. It was a page turner for sure.

Thank you NetGalley for this arc

Darling is a dark fantasy book by Mercedes M. Yardley [Release 2022]. The story is set in a town called Darling. It is full of dark things that operate in the darkness leaving the people gloomy. Cerise, the main character was born and brought up in Darling. She runs away as a pregnant teen with hopes of raising a happy family with E another teenager born in Darling. She later returns with two children to the horrors of Darling.

The book is full of atrociousness such as townspeople thinking outsiders are the problem yet whispering to each other that the darkness is within them. Rosemary, a Darling born lives with the bones of a dead person for year's

Themes of family, love, murder, and horror are apparent in the book. Mordachi is always being teased because he never had a good family. You might want to check the book to learn what happened while he was growing up. He also loves Cerise and little Jonah. People of the town are scared of a child killer who leaves parts of the dead children in weird places.

I loved the book because it showed how evil was eating up each character. 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. Many characters were not well developed but they served their purpose.

I rate this book 4 out of 5 stars. The book is entertaining through a story you cannot guess. The book is professionally edited.

I recommend this book to lovers of fantasy, horror, and works of fiction. The book contains disturbing parts when focusing on Jonah, a child who has genetic disorders. Others include a frantic Cerise and the killing affair.

I received this book for free via netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This story has promise, but I genuinely struggled to stay interested at times. I really like the premise and there are some parts that are great, but others that are lacking. It's complicated in that way. I think it would make a decent horror film, but sometimes horror books struggle to keep people's interest. I had a difficult time trying to sympathize with Cherry. She was handed bad cards in life, and she put her whole heart into raising her kids, who have individual struggles. There's also a lot of ableism towards Jonah, who is special needs. It never directly says //what// he has, but the what part of the equation isn't an important part of the story.
The last 30ish percent of the book flows just fine, but the first half is pretty confusing. I kept thinking "okay is this a paranormal story? Or is cherry just severely traumatized? Or is it both?"
I also don't like that romance was squished into it. It kinda gives off the impression that cherry HAS to have a man to get through life, and that isn't true.
This isn't a bad book by any means, but I did struggle with it. The cover is cool though and ultimately why I requested to read it.

Thank you again to netgalley for the opportunity to read this.

3.5/5

Yardley's writing style is, as always, beautiful. She has a way with words that speaks directly to the emotions; I admire her craft.

Darling is many things: haunted house, love story, small town horror, murder mystery, family drama, and more. But perhaps it tries to do too much for its own good.

It raises an interesting question about small town horror - is the town itself the source of evil, or does it just strip the veneer away and let people become the monsters they have always been?

As much as I appreciate Yardley's writing style, I do not think Darling is her best work. It is perhaps the most intimate and personal book, but not the most compelling one. I liked it but I didn't love it as much as her other stories.

ARC through NetGalley

Wow. This book was a page turner! What started out as a calmer mystery developed into true horror and I loved it! It would have been a five star read for me if not for the dialogue. Sometimes Cherry seemed so dumb. But other than that, this was a harrowing tale of a mothers love and a town with a rotten core that is twisty and well worth the read!

Darling is not like any books that I have read before, and while it took a while to get to where it wanted to be, it was a good read in the end, and with the ending that it had, it was not at all what I expected.


(Will update with blog and social links when live)

I received an eARC copy from Black Spot Books via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Reading Darling was my first encounter with Mercedes M. Yardley's writing, and I have to say that reading it felt easy and smooth, with a good pace. Darling brings us into the life of Cerise Cherry LaRouche, who returns to her hometown eight years after leaving what she thought would be for good, with two children, no money, and ready to start a new life in a familiar place. Since this book belongs to the horror genre, I expected something more frightening, more chilling, and creepier.

However, sadly, we have something very predictable and outright average, with so many elements included, which took away the scary and mysterious part. We have: moving back home, having oh so many admirers and fans from the very first second she set her foot back in Darling, meeting old friends and enemies back home, facing jealousy and hatred that never faded away, trying to make ends meet as a single mom of two, looking for romantic love (because she does, whether it is the main plot of the book or not), having her daughter kidnapped, keeping her head cool with her tender son, behaving naively throughout the entire story (I felt like giving her a good wake-up shake more than once), the episode with Wendy in the shop, playing with other people's emotions in a weird love triangle, learning about the possible reasons for Jonah's illness, but not explaining it well or clearing out is it the truth or not - what a whirlwind of actions!

Why are there so many elements in a horror story? Why is there such a jumble of small and short images that don't add anything? Was there a need for them all? All these particles don't build up the world that much and most certainly don't make it a horror one; they only confuse the reader more and more, leaving all the questions unanswered. I felt more like reading a romance with dark elements of a mystery than reading a horror novel. It feels so overstuffed with ideas, with only two of them being executed well - Cerise's breakdown and utter powerlessness with her daughter's disappearance and the vengeful mob at the end of the story (tho, it was clearly aimed at a wrong person, but what does an angry mob know).

What kept me glued to the book was who is the Handsome butcher? Who is the monster who kidnaps and breaks innocent children like dolls, bringing a dark, gloomy atmosphere into town? The epilogue did not answer that either; not sure if meant for a sequel or not, but here we are.

The book overall left me disappointed. It is super ambitious, it aims high with its potential, but in the end, it falls flat and gives no closure.

I’ve read the author’s work before and found it enjoyable, so I had some expectations going in. This proved to be a strange book, though, a book that tried to do too much, a book that didn’t know what it was or wanted to be. So much so that it ended up dropping steadily from 4 to 2 stars throughout the reading. And here’s why…
First thing first, Yardley can write, immersively and evocatively. The writing itself is fine. The plotting though left so much to be desired.
Meet Cherry LaRouche, the darling of Darling, Louisiana. A wild child who’s made every possible wrong choice in her 20some years that led her to the place she’s when we meet her…a crappy apartment with a lecherous landlord with two young fatherless kids, one with severe special needs, and a cleaning job that barely allows her to get by. Oh, Cherry. If only you had listened to your mother…or I don’t know, used protection.
Anyway, Cherry hated her mother, but now that mother has died and left Cherry her place – a ramshackle place that contains no good memories but it spacious, private, and paid off for five years. Cherry takes it.
Moving back proves surprisingly easy. Quite literally, the moment Cherry sets foot back on Darling’s soil, she is surrounded by fawning admirers. People are just lining up to feed her, sand her deck, watch her kids.
Why? All Cherry ever tells us is how evil Darling is. And yet…
And then, there’s all the romance. If there’s one single thing that drags this novel down it is that…the fact that it so desperately tries to be a romance novel, which is…you know…yuck. Unless you’re into that sort of thing, which doesn’t make it any less yuck but might make this more of the right choice for you.
As a teenager, Cherry hooked up with the most popular kid in Darling and vamoosed. The kid proved to be a royal penis and dropped her like yesterday’s trash the second their special needs kid was born, but that should give you some idea of Cherry’s taste in men. Also, the fact that her second child was created while she was prostituting herself trying to pay for the first one.
Now, that she’s back, all the men who missed their opportunity the first time around with Cherry and who apparently have just been waiting around this entire time, come flocking in.
She selects the hot one with a stupid name over her awesome brother-in-law with a strange name. (This is the South, y’all).
Then she proceeds to toil in this cheesily torrid love triangle.
Oh, also there is a serial killer around who seems to enjoy abducting, murdering, and dismembering small children.
Also, there may or may not be a supernatural angle to it all. This includes the father of one of the victims, another devastatingly handsome Indian man with liquid eyes - a description the author is such a fan of, she uses it over and over again in an almost fetishistic manner.
There’s also Cherry’s number one female friend, a blunt weirdo who lives alone with her mother in a distinctly Bates-ian sort of way.
And then, Cherry’s baby girl gets abducted, and things get even crazier.

So, what was the author trying to do here? Was she going for a Southern Gothic? (because she got there, again in a strangely fetishistic way). Was this meant to be a serial killer mystery? A romance? A tale of supernatural? Was the author, as a mother of a special needs child herself, writing an ode to moms such as her everywhere?
Because that’s a lot for a single novel. And while there might be a way to make all of it work, this book doesn’t find that way. It crams too much and muddies the waters, especially for the serial killer mystery angle. Ambitious, sure, but in the end, a flop. Not a terrible flop, a readable, even mildly entertaining one, but overall, it underwhelms and disappoints more than it entertains. The writing’s good but doesn’t distract from the strangely nuanced yet clichéd characters. Some readers might fall under Cherry’s spell, but this darling’s charms are not for everyone. Thanks Netgalley.

I received my very first ARC on 26th February, and I've been putting off writing this review ever since. I had mixed feelings about this book, and it took me a while to get them sorted before getting started with this review.

*Deep breath*

Darling by Mercedes M Yardley is a book that surprised me, and pleasantly so, but for all the wrong reasons. Before I get started on my long, warbling rant, here's the description of the plot:

At the age of sixteen, Cherry LaRouche escaped the clutches of Darling, Louisiana. Cherry and her children return to Cherry's childhood house following her mother's death, where the walls murmur and something horrible skitters across the roof at night.

The bodies of several murdered children crop up as Cherry tries to reintegrate into a town where evil is spreading like an illness. Cherry is forced to confront the true horrors of Darling when her own kid goes missing.

Okay, now that that's done, let's dive into the murky depths of this book. I went into this book expecting the same old dragged-out tale of a haunted house, but it wasn't that. At all.

The thing that struck me right off the bat was the character of Cherry. Despite having a rough life, she does everything she can for her children to have a good life. Yes, sometimes the choices she makes are questionable, but, it's inevitably plain that Cherry loves her kids and that she would do anything for them. This fact struck me because of the constant parallels that we get into how her mother used to treat her, and the way she treats her kids now.

Secondly, this book was slightly reminiscent of the novel IT by Stephen King. Before you say no, hear me out, okay? In IT, childhood friends return back to their hometown Derry, where evil has taken root again, just like it did when they were kids, to destroy it once and for all. In Darling, Cherry comes back to her childhood home to confront the terrors of her past, as well as the evil that resides in the town and its people. Both have a supernatural element in them. Both show a comparison between how we deal with trauma in our childhood and adulthood. Both show how evil simmers beneath a town, within its people, and bides its time until it can strike again. Both have monsters that prey on kids. However, the take on monsters in Darling was a very unique one. I've read a lot of books in the horror genre, and I don’t think any book had such a take on monsters.

Thirdly, it seemed appalling how literally every man in Darling had an infatuation with Cherry. I get that she's beautiful, but, the way men fell head over heels over her for apparently no reason whatsoever, was slightly jarring.

Fourthly, the ending seemed slightly rushed. The way it was written was beautiful, but, after the relatively slow pacing of the first three-quarters of the book, the ending seemed to come out of nowhere. And the way the book ended also seemed a tad bit anti-climatic.

Another teensy tiny complaint I have with the book is the name chosen for the child murderer. Why would you ever call someone who breaks children like dolls a "handsome butcher"? How does his being handsome even matter to the plot? How is it relevant? It made me laugh hysterically the first time I read it.

But, I have to give this book credit where it's due. It was entertaining and kept me guessing until the very end. The descriptions were just right and hit me right in the feels.

*Chef's kiss*

I'd rate this book a solid 3.5/5. If the author had decided to call him LITERALLY anything other than the "handsome butcher", it would have been a 4/5. I'm definitely going to check out her other books since I loved her writing style.

I really enjoyed this until the last few chapters- then it kind of split off into too many directions and seemed to rush through to tie them all off. Overall, solid storytelling, a dark southern gothic style Nightmare on Elm Street is how it felt through the first 3/4.

Darling by Mercedes M. Yardley is a fast-paced whirlwind of a story, all topped off with lots of action and even some supernatural elements. It also is the heart wrenching story of a woman whose child gets taken for her, and who has been dealing with more than she should have been able to handle in the past.

Cherry LaRoche's character was broken and slightly unlikeable from the start, but I do think that was on purpose. Actually, most of the people in the book are straight up terrible, and it shows just how bad the town of Darling is for Cherry and her kids. It really makes the reader understand why she ran off in the first place, and how some places are just rotten from the core. Did Cherry make some extremely questionable decisions? Sure! But imagine how you would act in these situations. I can’t even imagine.

Reading about a little girl that is missing and has been taken from her family was extremely difficult to read, and it made me think how terrible someone would feel in that situation. Yardley did an awesome job portraying these emotions.

I stayed up way too late last night to finish the book, and even though I wished the book would’ve ended differently, the author chose to show us that it does not always end with a “cherry” on top. I’m not saying more, so as not to spoil it!

An immersive read! Couldn’t put it down. If only all horrors could be this way. Straight to the point, but with enough detail. I’m a single mum of two myself, so I could relate to the characters very well. Can’t wait for more from this author