Greater than a twisted fairy tale, The Salt Grows Heavy takes inspiration from a wide range of mermaid lore and legends, laying the mythos out on a surgical desk and taking it aside little by little. This brief, sharp novella flays its characters open—usually actually—with a purpose to carry out a surgical, queer satire of pleased endings. Cassandra Khaw’s writing is masterful, and her horror is grotesque and gleeful, rendered in grisly prose that it’s essential to select from between your enamel.
An unnamed Plague Physician escorts a mermaid via the nation as she makes an attempt to return to the ocean. The mermaid had lengthy been a concubine of the native prince; her kids are much more feral, and have both already escaped to the ocean or wreaked havoc on their father’s kingdom. Because the Plague Physician and the mermaid journey, they run right into a village of murderous, servant-children led by three saints who boast of immortality.
Echoes of a dozen fairy tales reverberate via the e book. Small asides from the mermaid, our first-person narrator, present a mirror for the story. These moments are arduous truths delivered in between grotesque playfulness. All through your entire e book, there are illustrations of the type of widespread, merciless indifferences that always mark out older fairy tales. There may be nonetheless empathy, we nonetheless ache for the Plague Physician and the mermaid, however the e book doesn’t faux that ache is a thriller, making a tapestry out of trauma.
Inside The Salt Grows Heavy is an exploration of the physique—who owns your physique, who sees it, what can it create? There’s a type of anger at our bodies, a frustration with the truth that the physique can heal from hurt, that point generally doesn’t matter in terms of therapeutic, and the way in which that merely having a physique offers folks a uniting language with which to speak. The mermaid embodies a type of diaspora narrative, keen to destroy all the pieces round her if she will be able to maintain onto one thing that feels steady, if she will be able to have hope.
There’s a distinct, unrelenting horror within the writing of this e book. One of many nice strains, delivered by the mermaid after actually consuming components of males which have been reduce up and discarded, is “There may be nothing fallacious with being a monster.” Exquisitely dictating disgust, The Salt Grown Heavy composes an opera of gore and viscera, combining need and repulsion to create a physique of labor.
This e book is stuffed with horrors that really feel like a fever dream, written out as a type of stream of terrorized consciousness. However the ending is hopeful, a type of tender twist that seems like a wink at addenda to fairy tales, telling you that possibly it’s not all unhealthy, possibly there’s residence, possibly after 500 years of excellent deeds even monsters get souls. It’s a sort ending. It’s one we wish to think about all of us deserve.
Lastly, a notice: I’ve a behavior of annotating my books—apart from the truth that I usually want to put in writing concerning the books after I learn them, I get pleasure from writing down ideas, reactions, and moments that shocked me whereas studying. I’ve hardly ever marked up a e book as continuously or with so many exclamation marks as I’ve whereas studying The Salt Grows Heavy. Khaw’s line writing is masterful, experimental, and evocative, with that means inferred in between scalpels to the meat of the story.
The Salt Grows Heavy is horror, sure, but it surely’s extra like a fable—a narrative advised round campfires about monster hunters and monster fuckers, with your mates yelling from the treeline, making an attempt to scare you. It’s a e book that’s feckless with its cruelty, however cautious with its intimacy. With a language that appears distinctive to its pages, The Salt Grows Heavy is the type of e book that sticks to the roof of your mouth, and prowls the darker corners of your thoughts lengthy after you end it, like a wolf, like a shark, like a monster.
The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw is out there now wherever books are sold.
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