How HarperCollins Cheated Wiley Cash

The first story Wiley Cash remembers telling was told to his neighbor when they were six years old. His family had just returned from Myrtle Beach. Cash told the boy that his dad had buried him neck-deep in the sand, so deep that a crab latched on to his big toe. His sister overheard the story and asked, “Why’d you lie? That didn’t happen.” Cash didn’t have an answer for her. The truth was they’d played in the sand, and swam in the ocean, which seemed boring. But to have your big toe almost torn off by a crab? Now that’s a good story.

Later in life Cash thought about his lie but knows that as a six-year-old, you’re called a liar when you tell a story that you know isn’t true. But if you can keep telling stories and writing them down, people will eventually call you a writer.

Tiffany B. Davis


Cash, Wiley (2012-04-17). A Land More Kind Than Home . HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

This Dark Road to Mercy is a novel of love and atonement, blood and vengeance, set in western North Carolina, involving two young sisters, a wayward father, and an enemy determined to see him pay for his sins.

After their mother's unexpected death, twelve-year-old Easter and her six-year-old sister Ruby are adjusting to life in foster care when their errant father, Wade, suddenly appears. Since Wade signed away his legal rights, the only way he can get his daughters back is to steal them away in the night.

Brady Weller, the girls' court-appointed guardian, begins looking for Wade, and he quickly turns up unsettling information linking Wade to a recent armored car heist, one with a whopping $14.5 million missing. But Brady Weller isn't the only one hunting the desperate father. Robert Pruitt, a shady and mercurial man nursing a years-old vendetta, is also determined to find Wade and claim his due.

Narrated by a trio of alternating voices, This Dark Road to Mercy is a story about the indelible power of family and the primal desire to outrun a past that refuses to let go.

(FYI: I cut and pasted this HarperCollins synopsis from Amazon. I’m glad that I didn’t read it before I read the novel. For me, it tells too much of the story and leaves little, except the ending, to be discovered.)

Now for the difficult part—a review:

The premise of “This Dark Road” is pretty solid but the conflicts were so coincidental and serendipitous that it read more like a Nancy Drew mystery than the Southern Gothic novel some tout it to be.

I enjoyed that the story is set in the summer that both Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire were trying to break Roger Maris's home run record. I’m not a fan of baseball but Cash added just enough information about the rivalry to knit the story together and not bore me with a sport I don’t appreciate.

The Southern (North Carolina) dialect didn’t seem quite authentic and the three voices—Easter, Weller, and Pruitt all sound the same—the same as Cash’s.

It seems that Cash wrote this book with the notion that someone would turn it into a screenplay and then a movie. With a little help I believe it could be. It certainly has sufficient plot and charm but I’m afraid, if the movie is done right, people will never say, I liked the book better.

The book has flaws…flaws that a good editor could have easily corrected, like what Tay Hohoff did for Harper Lee. Hohoff realized that Lee’s Go Set A Watchman was a rough draft. She encouraged Lee to turn that rough draft into the beloved masterpiece, To Kill A Mockingbird.

An astute editor at HarperCollins could and should have recognized that Cash’s manuscript was not ready for publication. HarperCollins cheated Wally Cash and HarperCollins cheated me as a reader. This Dark Road To Mercy stopped being literary fiction with the title. HarperCollins could and should have encouraged and assisted Wally Cash to turn this rough draft of a novel into a triumphant Southern Gothic novel, maybe to become one of the best books of the century.

Had this book been self-published I’d give it 5 stars because of its charm and the last line that lingers. But because the publisher is prestigious, respected, and a royalty publishing company This Dark Road To Mercy will have to settle for 2 stars.