LOVE IS A CREMATORIUM by Mercedes M. Yardley (BOOK REVIEW)
A woman builds her lover from carefully scavenged pieces and parts. A young girl is groomed for madness by one who loves her most. A neurodivergent boy organizes his life, and loss, by the ticking of a clock. And love can be the most splendid and destructive force in the entire world.
Love is a Crematorium and Other Tales is a collection of seventeen stories that are both bleak and beautiful, devastating and sweet. Enter the crematorium to experience grief, starlit nights, and gorgeous tragedy that make our souls burn from the inside out.
In this volume Yardley brings together an eclectic collection of writings including short stories previously published in a variety of magazines and some touching excerpts from a memoir in progress. Yardley has always danced deftly around the edge of horror, with silvered prose and whimsical reflections that differently illuminate some dark themes without ever trivialising them. The front matter includes trigger warnings about some of those themes emphasising that this, while softly written, is not a soft collection. The excellent cover design also epitomises the style of the stories, in deliciously juxtaposing the shocking and the ordinary.
Gabino Iglesias provides a striking introduction asserting early on that “Listen, this isn’t a normal collection, so I won’t write a normal intro.” True to his word, Iglesias eschews convention and gets elbow deep in the viscera of Yardley’s writing to extol its many virtues, starting an excellent list of reasons to pick up the book with the following opening.
“Every line below is extremely accurate, and both of my violent sides (sounds better than saying you’re entirely violent) won’t tolerate any discussion about this.”
My own impression is that Yardley’s writing reminds of the soft touch and elegance of that great tennis player Miloslav Mecir, who used soft hands and strange angles to confound his opponents in an era of big hitting slam-bang merchants.
Like Mecir, Yardley manages to be always surprising, effortlessly smooth and yet sharply effective. And like the Slovak ‘big cat’ of the tennis courts, there is a feline grace to Yardley’s prose.
The opening story Loving You Darkly features a protagonist Silva whose world has been overrun by monstrous parasitic creatures called breeders and she alone survives in a hole beneath the ground scavenging the killing fields for the bones of the fallen from whom she builds a lover in the form of a mismatched skeleton.
Silva smiled, but her lips quivered, and she dashed at her cheeks with the backs of her hands. The skeleton nearly remembered the purpose of water leaking from the eyes, but it was soon lost with the rest of his memories.
Like Frankenstein’s monster, the Skeleton has some access to the memories and skills of the different dead whose bones form part of his uneven form. The interaction between the two, as fantastic as the story concept might be, is deeply touching as they reflect on the ruin wrought on their world and how to still carve out an existence.
Other stories, like Clocks, Salt and the memoir excerpt A threadbare Shirt draw on Yardley’s own experiences as a parent of a child with a genetic condition that manifests in non-neuro typical behaviours. Yardley skilfully and sympathetically gives the reader an insight into living with such difference, both as a parent and as child – moving into adulthood.
In just beyond her dreaming Yardley gives us the tale of Hester, a woman trapped by an unsuitable name and a husband obdurate in his misunderstanding of her, so it is no wonder she takes a lover – yet of course this is Yardley writing – so the lover is invisible. Hester’s yearning for creativity and life is captured in lines like this.
Real woman sat at the window and sewed intricate little swatches of embroidery. They didn’t pull their hair loose and lean into the room’s sunlight with an absolutely indecent hunger. They didn’t close their eyes and smell the deep, dark scent of the paints and powders and brushes as Hester did.
And there is the pain of an overbearing spouse who mistakes control for love
William’s words showered on her skin as falling stars, and they burned just as badly.
Iglesias in signing off his introduction “In Austin, August of 2024, watching the world burn with a heart full of hope” might have had this line of Yardley’s in mind
The sun shone in that gentle way it has in the early morning before it remembers how horrid an loathsome humanity can be.
Besides the fantastic and surreal story settings, Yardley also gives us some more familiar urban fantasy with an array of Mean Girls tormenting first person protagonist Luna not just at school but at the diner where she works. But Luna has a demon – or does the demon have her? Mean Girls is perhaps the more conventional fantasy story within the collection, largely because the first-person voice elides the touches of whimsical narration that Yardley can explore in third person or omniscient writing. However, that gives Yardley the opportunity to indulge in some delightful inner monologues and outer banter. For example when Luna is bowed over a bathroom sink in the wake of the latest bully blow.
“Luna,” a voice called. It sounded soft and sincere. I didn’t trust it. “Luna, lonely girl.”
“Really?” I said aloud, peering down the sink. “You’re going to do the drain thing? Everybody’s seen IT. You can’t scare me with something so unoriginal.”
The collection is speckled with lovely lines.
When Stanley Tutelage finds a new home as part of his two-year plan
The house was made of poorly stacked stones, but the vines and moss made love to the walls in such a way that it held together beautifully.
Or, in the final eponymous story in the collection – Love is a crematorium a tale of two desperate runaways bound by love and loyalty, yet fleeing hate and violence.
She tried to step back, but Kelly held her closer and rested his chin on her head, careful not to hurt her. Her body was fragile, made of spun sugar and spider webs.
Much as Iglesias expressed in his introduction, it is impossible to categorise or pigeonhole Yardley’s enthralling but varied writing. This collection is like a box of treasures, the kind of memory box of items that a mother might leave for a child. Each piece significant in how it captures a moment in time, yet different in style and form to every other piece.
These stories range from the most uncanny borders of fiction, to the most grounded observations of fact. They vary in length from a handful pages to at least novelette, if not novella. Yardley shifts gear between inhabiting the protagonist’s heads, or observing from an almost divine distance. But each one is a perfect treasure that will draw you in and leave you breathless.
Mercedes M. Yardley is a whimsical dark fantasist who wears red lipstick and poisonous flowers in her hair. She is the author of numerous works including Darling, the Stabby Award-winning Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear A Tale of Atomic Love, Pretty Little Dead Girls, Detritus in Love, and Nameless. She won the Bram Stoker Award for her stories Little Dead Red and “Fracture,” and was a nominee for “Loving You Darkly” and the Arterial Bloom anthology. Mercedes lives and works in Las Vegas. You can find her at mercedesmyardley.com.