*3 stars but more like a 3 1/2 stars.*

This was definitely one of the most unique books i’ve read this year. I’d previously only read one other book by Cassandra Khaw and it was Nothing But Blackened Teeth. It was an okay story but it needed a bit more character development. This book is like the complete opposite. It is EXTREMELY detailed in more ways than one.

First off, the actual writing style of this. WOW. So complex, a lot of words that I don’t use on a day-to-day basis. You might need a dictionary while you read this. However, Khaw strings together long, beautiful pieces of writing. Her descriptions of gore and trauma are beautifully detailed. Sometimes, it does feel like she adds complicated words to some parts for no other reason than for it to sound fancy. Overall though, really nice.

Unfortunately, the actual plot of the story is what fell a little flat for me. This book has A LOT of different things going on. This book has everything that would have me excited: mermaids, plague doctors, cults, and body horror. However, i feel like the book should have been expanded into a bigger novel. Apparently, this is in the same universe as another piece of writing by Khaw. It’s possible I may have missed out on some background info before reading this book. It was just so many good ideas but I wanted so much more information from them. I loved the incorporation of mermaids and the reader is teased with bits of history about the character. I would have loved a whole book just on her and her story. Same thing in the case of the plague doctor. Their backstory is fascinating but I almost wished it was a separate story. I did enjoy the two characters’ relationship. It really has you rooting for them at the end.

Overall, I liked this but it’s not a love for me. I just wanted more information and more backstory. If you go into this for horror, the actual horror scenes are great. A lot of body horror and it is very detailed.

Once again, thank you to Netgalley and Tor Nightfire for the digital ARC of this.

HIGHLIGHTS
~the eyeballs of saints taste delicious
~be very suspicious of immortality
~do not fuck with mermaids

In 2021, I discovered Khaw via their novel The All-Consuming World – and fell head-over-heels in love with their incredibly decadent, luscious, shameless prose. I vowed then to read everything of theirs…even though they usually write hardcore horror, and as we know, I’m a horror wimp.

But with writing this beautiful, I am helpless to resist.

This is an odd little novella, which readers paying close attention will realise is set in the same world as Khaw’s short story These Deathless Bones – I can only hope this means Khaw plans to return to this world periodically, because I love it, but the Witch Bride does not herself appear in The Salt Grows Heavy, even though she’s refenced. (Alas. I suspect she’d have been an excellent ally to our main characters!) Regardless, in this book, a man-eating mermaid decides to wander the world for a time with a nonbinary plague doctor, whose admittedly mysterious origins still don’t come close to the darkly thrilling wonders of her own.

They encounter a cult whose practices the doctor does not approve of…and the two of them decide to intervene. For the doctor, it’s a Big Deal; for the mermaid, it’s a whim. Regardless, there are Consequences for everyone involved.

The stakes are life and death – and some kind of in-between immortality – but in this context those are still low stakes. The Salt Grows Heavy is not concerned with the fate of kingdoms; the story feels small – not petty or meaningless, but self-contained, isolated. Unlikely to affect anyone not present in its pages. I haven’t encountered books that feel like this very often, but it’s not unpleasant, just unfamiliar.

As for the story itself… A lot of it felt a little random, but I’m not sure if Things actually came out of nowhere, or if I just missed the set-up for them during one of those moments when I had to skim or skip ahead to avoid the worst of the body-horror elements. I had to do that quite a bit! Because as usual, Khaw holds nothing back in tenderly, lovingly describing the look of a person’s insides or the sensation (and taste) of an eyeball popping between one’s teeth.

I’LL PUT UP WITH A LOT FOR GORGEOUS PROSE, OKAY?

<Names are like selkie-skins, often carelessly attended, left in view of those who would misuse them. Utilized correctly, though, they can kill a man, can turn a girl to a thing of teeth and dead eyes, an appetite to devour worlds; can make infernos of maidens, phoenixes of bones who have been asleep for so long they’ve forgotten the shape of rage.

Names have so much power.>

And the prose is gorgeous – lush and rich and decadent, and wiser people than me should put together an essay on how much more viscerally horrifying horror becomes when it’s made beautiful; the dissonance of it, the way it seduces the reader, slyly transforming them from passive onlooker to almost-active participant. When you make horror beautiful, you make the reader want the horror – and that in itself is far more horrifying than anything that can happen on page. It moves the horror from the book into the reader. It turns the reader into a monster too, for the length of the story.

I am pretty sure Khaw knows this, and revels in it. They’re certainly a master at it!

Surprising no one, I’m sure, my favourite parts of The Salt Grow Heavy were the moments when we got mermaid lore. Khaw gives us just enough to establish how very un- and inhuman their mermaids are; enough to make me long for more. I would have been so happy to read the mermaid’s backstory; her life in the ocean, her leaving the water, burning down the kingdom that tried to cage her. We get very brief not-quite-flashbacks to her life with the king who made her tongueless, but the focus is very much post-fairytale, not the retelling that came before.

<I allow myself, for the gash of a moment, to remember what I once possessed: the abyssal ocean the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god; the searing colors moting my sisters’ coils, sapphire and quartz crushed into constellations, patterns prisms of incandescence spiraling through the dark, our tails in endless, restless motion; our mother’s eyes, colossal, phosphorescent; our father’s ribs, still studded with our egg sacs, his heartbeat in our veins. I’d been happy there. I could have been happy there forever.>

In the Acknowledgements (in the arc, anyway – it’s perfectly possible they might change in the final copy) Khaw describes The Salt Grows Heavy as ‘about people who won’t give up on each other, who stay even when the world crumbles to ash, who hold on even when there’s nothing but hope.’ I admit, this puzzled me a little, because the love story that develops here seemed very sudden to me, not something that was central to the book.

But again, who knows what I missed all those times I flinched from the horror? And I’m not the best at understanding romance anyway.

In short…this is an odd little book. I think it’s one I need to reread, maybe several times, before I understand it fully – but it’s such a darkly beautiful read that I really don’t mind at all.

Take my thoughts with – ahem – a pinch of salt, since I fully acknowledge I probably missed things. But I did love this, and I’m glad I read it, and I’ll be happy to reread it. It’s definitely, easily my second-favourite book of Khaw’s (it’s going to be tough to beat All-Consuming World) and I strongly recommend it to anyone looking for a short but breathtaking read that might just tear your heart out of your chest.

Get your dictionaries ready because this one is a challenge and a delight to decipher. I enjoyed being inside this strange and scary yet somehow a little familiar world, but I just wanted it to be a little more fleshed out.

Phenomenal.

The Little Mermaid meets Frankenstein.

A story of love found, lost, and found again. A story of possession taken and given freely.

Dark and bloody and lovely.

A mermaid and a plague doctor go on a journey, I don't actually recall why and I don't think much really happens. I understand it's supposed to be only three days-worth of a journey, but nothing really moves the story forward. The only journey taken, really, is the journey you take within a sentence as there are inconsistencies where some of the dialogue is elaborate and some is very plain, for no apparent reason.
This book asks "what if words were meaningless?" as there really is no rhyme or reason for the author's wording. I'll leave you with a simple example, the main character's traveling companion is dressed as a plague doc. At one point, she mentions that he makes a sound that echoes in the keratin of his mask or something. Not only would keratin be an unnecessary replacement of the word "bone", keratin isn't even a major component of bone.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher, but this was not really for me.

Though the writing style was not for me, I was still very much drawn into the dark and gory world of the mermaid-like creature and plague doctor. I very much appreciated the use of singular they/them for the plague doctor, and enjoy seeing the two characters bond through the novella. For reader’s advisory, I can definitely see myself recommending this to patrons who enjoy horror or dark twists on fairytales/folklore.

Imaginative, dark, and gorgeous, this is a lush little book with teeth. Greatly enjoyed, devoured in one gulp.

This was a bit of a mixed bag for me. On one hand, I really loved the idea of reimagining THE LITTLE MERMAID as a dark fantasy body horror gorefest. I am always down for new interpretations of old stories, and Khaw has made such a fascinating and, frankly, disgusting (in a good way!) retelling of the classic tale that I am VERY tickled by the results. This novella is one of the most grotesque things I've read in recent memory, and I say that with only affection and as a high compliment because Khaw's descriptions are powerful and disgusting in the ways you want from body horror. But on the other hand, the writing style was VERY flowery and purple prose-like, and as a personal preference these kinds of language and literary choices are very hard for me. It also felt like we jumped into the story about half way through the narrative, and I would have liked to see a bit more exploration of the actual LITTLE MERMAID tale as opposed to picking up after that had fallen apart.

Body horror fans will find a lot to like with THE SALT GROWS HEAVY, assuming that the flowery language doesn't throw up a road block like it did for me. I acknowledge that's more based on my own preferences, though, so take that as you will.

The synopsis for this book is understandably difficult to nail. I think people may be confused by it. I think all you need to know is that this is a lush fairy tale that goes dark.

This is a difficult book to rate. I didn’t enjoy being dropped into the story abruptly with very little introduction to the characters or the world. The writing is flowery and literary. This definitely leans toward fantasy horror. It’s not what I was expecting. This had some incredibly described body horror as well. Though I didn’t love the beginning, once I got used to the writing I kept going and the ending will definitely stick with me. In fact the ending pulled me from a 2.5 to a 4. So my advice would be, if you’re having trouble with this just keep reading. It all comes together in the end.

The two main characters are so fascinating, both individually and in their dynamics. I would’ve followed them through any adventure. When they find some disturbing practices, they can’t help but explore this cult of sorts. Everything after that part rocks too. Just an all-round banger of a story. Took my favorite parts of fantasy, mixed them with body horror, and I couldn’t be happier with the result. Highly recommend. Quick read, too.

Another tight venture into lyrical horror for Cassandra Khaw. This little book is packed with atmosphere and puts a vivid and unique spin on a beloved and infrequently adapted fairytale.

I hope this book finds its audience, but for me, something about the writing just didn't work. I had a similar experience with the author previously, but wanted to try again. A little too fantasy for me maybe? Either way, there will undoubtedly be readers who love this, just wasnt' for me.

Review will be live on the 3rd of May at: http://www.nerds-feather.com/2023/05/review-salt-grows-heavy-by-cassandra.html

My initial response to finishing this novella was "what the fuck did I just read?", and I stand by that assessment... but in a positive way. It's a deeply peculiar book, and one that's somewhat hard to describe when dragged outside the confines of the story.

It's a reimagining of the little mermaid, but... after the story...

A mermaid and a plague doctor go on a journey, both haunted by the darkness of their pasts...

What if the really important part of the little mermaid was the murderous revenge she got on the entire kingdom...?

Creepy woodland child-cults are never a good sign! Do not trust them, even if you're functionally immortal...

All of these are perfectly reasonable ways of talking about the story. Essentially, we meet up with a mermaid after her offspring have devoured the kingdom of the prince who married her in her revenge, when a mysterious plague doctor sort of kind of invites her to come with them, wherever they're headed to, seemingly unphased by the total carnage she's caused. On their way to wherever they're going, they come across a group of children hunting one of their number in the woods, a chance encounter that leads down a dark and bloody path to the plague doctor's history, and the mermaid's future.

But even this does not give a true sense of what the story is, because it's one of those stories which simply refuses to be confined to its plot. It's not about what happens, but how. And the how is vividly, lusciously, darkly, incredibly gorily, sumptuously and intensely overwrittenly, in the best possible way. It is a story I devoured, simply and precisely because the prose was delicious.

It goes in hard right from the first paragraph, which includes:

I pause. In the penumbra, the fading dusk gorgeted by coral and gold, you could be forgiven for mistaking the ruined house a ribcage, the roof its tent of ragged skin. The foundation, at a careless look, could pass for bones, the door for a mouth, the chimney a finger crooked at the sky, or at a wife who would not be a saviour.

And if anything, it only goes in harder as the story goes on.

This is the core of this novella's appeal in my opinion - if you like that level of intricate prose construction (and don't mind the grisly nature of the story), you will probably enjoy it immensely. If, however, you don't, or prose just isn't an interest or priority for you, this might be one that passes you by.

What's interesting about that, at least for me, is that I tend to prefer my stories to be character driven. And this isn't, really. We see a lot of the characters, but they are often opaque to each other and to us. We see through the mermaid's eyes, hear her thoughts, and yet even then she is remote and cold. Which is by design - she's meant to be alien, a creature living in our world but not of it, born of the chilly abyss of the sea, and hungry and uncaring and vengeful from it. So we see her, we spend the time growing to know her very well, and yet she remains cut off from us emotionally, by her very being. Where the prose is overwritten, the emotions are understated, the stuff of hints and shared looks leading to shared understanding, left for the reader to parse or not.

And as we progress through the story, it becomes clear how deliberate this is.

Because while it isn't all of what the story is, or is about, some of it is the story of someone who has been stripped of agency, of personhood, and who has exacted her revenge, but is still living with the legacy of what was done to her by a man who wanted to own her. Who told stories about her that misled the world about her nature. Who cut out of her tongue so she couldn't tell her own stories to counter them. So the fact that our access to her is at arm's reach feels especially fitting. We will know her as she wants us to know her, and no more, because she deserves that choice now.

We know the plague doctor, at least at first, at an even further remove. They speak little, and their emotional responses are something of a mystery to the mermaid, and so they are to us, through her interpretation. And while we never really get a deep sense of them through their words and perspective, we do begin to see the plague doctor as a deeply emotional person through their actions. It is more their story than the mermaid's, really, though it is told through her eyes.

But the two go together, as both of them are people who had their choices taken away from them, and were made into something else by people who had the power to do what they liked. Where the mermaid responds to this with bloody vengeance, the plague doctor has chosen kindness and healing, at least for now. What they feel about the mermaid's choices remains hidden to us, behind their mask and the mermaid's incomprehension of human feeling.

And so at its core, it's a story of two people who've suffered the greatest of injustices against their persons, and how they choose to live beyond that, how they respond to it, and how they relate to each other in the wake of their shared and different experiences. Because whatever emotion there is or is not in how we see them each through the mermaid's eyes, what there plainly is is fellowship, right from the start, and that link is such an appealing one, such a lovely one, that it keeps you invested through all the grisly body horror that comes with it.

I'm normally too much of a wuss for this kind of darkness, but in this, I didn't mind it. The writing transforms it into something beautiful at key moments, and the core dynamic between the two main characters makes it worthwhile even when it isn't beautiful. It makes a very strange, dark story, all told, but one whose wonder lies in that strangeness. It ends up with the feel of some old, dark fairy tale we don't tell anymore, where nothing is explained, a lot of people get murdered, and if there's any moral at all, it's not a gentle one. But sometimes those are exactly what you want, and this does it brilliantly.

I'm still torn on whether I love or hate Khaw's flowery prose, but I think it worked much better in this than in Nothing but Blackened Teeth. This was a weird, queer little story about relationships, which was not what I expected but I enjoyed it nonetheless. More vibes than plot, which worked overall.

"There is nothing wrong with being a monster."

Their mouth bends. "You always know the right things to say."

Words of comfort, from one monster to another. This book was the love story that I didn't know I needed, the love story of a mermaid and a plague doctor, two monsters who try to defeat other monsters and their tribal cult of young children. There are two major elements that I appreciated in this book. The beautiful, poetic language, oftentimes with such rich and arcane language that I was glad to use the web search feature of my ebook. And the graphic depictions of body horror, as the carnivorous mermaid has an appetite for sundry body parts and the adversary monsters, a trio of self-proclaimed saviors, seek immortality through the surgical harvesting of children's body parts. The grisly scenes of chopping and snipping and slicing and chomping are made more . . . palatable by the lyrically dense language that Khaw employs. It also helps that the story is told from the perspective of the nameless mermaid, who is lovingly devoted to her plague doctor.

This book hit all the right spots for me, and I want to thank Netgalley and Tor for the opportunity.

A twisted fairytale that left me both satisfied and wishing for more. 'The Salt Grows Heavy' is a book to savored and not devoured. Cassandra Khaw treats her prose like poetry and it creates an intoxicating reading experience.

Dropped directly into the action, 'The Salt Grows Heavy' wastes no time in getting to the point. You travel through a dark fairytale landscape with a mermaid, stranded after murdering her abusive human husband, and her only companion - a plague doctor with a tragic past. When they come face to face with the cult that birthed the good doctor nothing is certain anymore.

At first glance this novella is dense. Khaw has a clear love of language and it impacts her word choice throughout the novel. Overall, I found the plot compelling, gruesome (not without good reason), heartbreaking and tender. You made need a dictionary to weed through some of the more intense passages but I found that the elevated language choices aligned with the content -- the story is meant to be decadent and the words align directly with the lush almost velvet feel of the plot.

I enjoyed this read. It was one I could manage in one sitting. The ending was satisfying but left me wishing for a few more pages. Overall, I would give 'The Salt Grows Heavy' a solid 4 out of 5.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a honest review.

I suppose one of the things about requesting an ARC is that apart from some scant reviews and the provided synopsis, you don't have much to go off of. In most cases I think this is wonderful; I love diving into a book with no preconceptions. I think with this one though, I was given more than I bargained for.

This is a beautifully written novella, despite the content. I don't think I've ever looked up as many words while reading, bless the Kindle lookup feature. Each word is chosen with purpose and each sentence lyrically crafted. I also think this is one of the few novellas I've read that is exactly the length it should be. I thought the book was eerie, disgusting, and atmospheric. I enjoyed our characters and the relationship between them, even if their development was a little flat.

With that being said, I think this is the closest I've gotten to reading splatterpunk, and I don't plan on getting any closer. I felt a little blindsided by the levels of explicit gore in this book and while I felt like I was in a good headspace to handle that, it was a lot. I think people who love graphic horror will eat this one up (pun not intended EW!), but for atmospheric slow-burn psychological horror girlies like me, it was a tad much.

If you decide to go for this one, take those content warnings seriously.

content warnings: cannibalism, body horror, gore, torture

I have read one other by Cassandra Khaw (Blackened Teeth), which had an amazing cover, but I really did not like the writing style of the author. I decided to give this one a chance since it, too, had great cover art, and I trust TOR Publishing Group to not steer me wrong! I have to say, I did enjoy this book, but I do have some issues with the writing style. The author is able to paint such a grotesque scene beautifully- poetic body horror in the best way! However, my issue lies in comprehension of the actual storyline. I find myself thinking, what is actually going on here? I have to read and reread passages many times. I think because I was familiar with this format from Blackened Teeth, I knew I'd have to really put on my thinking cap to parse out the plot. Another issue I had was the pronouns used for the single plague doctor. This is great to have LGBTQIA+ representation in literature (and I don't even know this is what the author went for), but in this context (and when talking about the group of several plague doctors), "they/them" was a bit confusing to know which was being referred to. I thought the actual storyline was horrifying, like the old Grimm Bros or Hans Christian Andersen tales-a mermaid seeks revenge. Although again, not exactly sure where the plague doctors fit into it all (unless this was some kind of commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic). It was unusual and unique, and I must admit-thrilling to watch a sort of patriarchy go down after the exploitation of the mermaid and her people. I will likely check out more from this author. Thanks, TOR and NetGalley for the ARC!

With The Salt Grows Heavy, Cassandra Khaw has written a novella that feels like my worst nightmare. The story starts with the main character, the mermaid who has comes to the sea to marry a prince, sitting in the charred remains of a kingdom that she and her daughters have destroyed. A person dressed as a plague doctor accompanies her out of the desolation and into the world. Make no mistakes. This is not a fairytale even though the main character is a fairytale mermaid. This kingdom is razed. This land is dark. This is a scourge. 

Cassandra Khaw writes deep and beautiful prose. There were times when I could feel everything that the characters felt. I could taste the things that they ate. The pain that they felt seeped from the page and into my own flesh. This denseness is off putting to some. Her sentences are sometimes complex and filled with tough phrasing and unknown words. The likelihood of any reader going through this novella and not having to look up a single word will be rare. However the concentration that the story demands, for us to delve into new language and writing, attaches us to the story, makes us dive deep into a world that is just as new and just as brutal to live through. This is purposeful. For a story that is only a little over 100 pages, this is not a casual read. The reader has to be completely engaged in the story from the very beginning. If we have to work to get into this story, through the writing, the more vivid and horrifying the world becomes. Admittedly, this will turn off quite a few readers, those who are looking for an easy book, but those who stick with The Salt Grows Heavy receive a story that displays great depths in agony and pain. 

This is a very short book, and I love the story and the characters. The mermaid and the plague doctor are compelling and unforgettable. I feel this is a setup book, like The Salt Grows Heavy is just a chapter in their story. This could be the beginning of a series of novellas. If this is a standalone and we never hear from these two characters again, The Salt Grows Heavy is a big treasure in a small package. Even though it takes some effort, the reward is worth it. I hope that it is just the beginning.

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Inspired by the fairytale The Little Mermaid, this novella is about the enduring power of love in a macabre but beautiful setting. Forget everything you think you know about this story because it features a plague doctor, a cult, and bloodthirsty children. Cassandra Khaw's writing is masterful and every word has a purpose, making this a captivating read.