Beautiful Sorrows is a short story collection by Mercedes M. Yardley.
Finished on: 2.7.2024

Content Note: sexualized violence/rape, child sexual abuse, abuse in general

“Plot”:
The short stories in this collection range from the very short to the slightly longer. They are all rather dark in content and have a fantastic element or two.

There has rarely been a more aptly named short story collection than this one: the stories indeed all find the beauty in sadness, or at least try to. For me, it got a little monotonous, but that doesn’t mean that the stories are bad.

Reading this collection, I found myself thinking that I would have loved it as a teenager to young adult. In fact, I may have tried my hands at writing stories like the ones collected here a couple of times during that period. But reading it now, I also found that this kind of writing doesn’t resonate with me anymore.

Yardley tackles some very gruesome topics, but she always does so with an eye to the aesthetic. And there is nothing wrong with that, per se, but I do think that there can and should be more reactions to mundane and fantastic horrors than trying to find the beauty and the sadness beneath the ugliness and the cruelty.

Most of the stories taken on their own are really good, but in culmination I grew impatient with the careful, thoughtful tone that they all seem to share. I wanted a bit more spontaneity, anger, maybe passion.

Admittedly, the introduction to the book already caught me on the wrong foot, as I got the distinct impression that the writer, P. Gardner Goldsmith, of the intro tried to subliminate his boner into appreciation for Yardley’s art. There was just way too much stuff like “she is a siren, beautiful and alluring, inside as well as outside”, with the distinct impression that the outside part was somehow more important. (In fact, I didn’t know the author of the intro, but after only a few lines, I was dead certain that he was a guy, and google confirmed it.) It’s an uncomfortable read that probably tainted the rest of the book for me.

That being said, Yardley is clearly a talented writer and I wouldn’t mind picking up more of her work should the opportunity present itself.

Summarizing: skip the foreword, and maybe don’t read it all at once and you’ll be good to go.