Reviews with content warning for Murder - The Salt Grows Heavy

A siren and a plague doctor travel the land together, walking away from destruction and right into something sinister in the middle of the woods. This is a strange book to summarize or even describe. It felt more like an event or a landscape. I think you'll either like this or absolutely despise it, no inbetween.

Beautiful yet challenging prose. At times I felt like I was wading through a swamp whenever the author threw these complex and uncommon words (not helped by the fact that English is my second language). Very vibes but with a lot of thoughts. I would highly recommend checking trigger warnings for this one, you'll find everything from cannibalism to child death to graphic gore. Ultimately I liked it but I felt cheated by the length, like a meal missing its main ingredient.

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natka_manatee's review

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dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

It’s not even the word themselves that are hard to understand, it’s the combination of them and the fact that after you recall the definition, they still don’t actually mean anything. What even happened here? What are “snow fountains” (pg14)? This is like an insufferable teenager discovering the thesaurus. Never again.

Also, this is not even remotely a fairytale. The only thing in common is that she (whoever she is bc she doesn’t have a pronounceable name) is technically a mermaid like “The Little Mermaid”. Although, she also walks on land the whole time and turns into fire at one point so who really knows.

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ejoverly's review

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

It takes you around half the book to wade through the nonsense sentences to figure out what this book is even about and then you spend the rest of the time second guessing yourself. It’s like she wrote the whole thing with predictive text. There was an overwhelming amount of adjectives that had you forgetting the beginning of the sentence by the time you made it to the end of the sentence. Most of the sentences didn’t mean anything at all and once cobbled together with the other sentences it STILL meant nothing.

Please do not read this book thinking it is a fairy tale. The description is very misleading. This was a gory waste of time. The only reason I finished it was because it was so short I thought surely it would get better. It DID NOT. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything worse.

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sydresnik's review

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challenging dark

Diverse cast of characters? Yes

2.0

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hoganbreathesinink's review

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challenging dark fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Definitely not for the faint of heart, but I absolutely loved it. Very dark and grisly–I was so intrigued by the glimpses we get of the world the characters inhabit.

I would definitely read a lengthier book with the mermaid and the plague doctor's backstories!

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elle_e_d_light's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.75

I found this very challenging as a read. The vocabulary used sometimes feels very thesaurus-y. I have a pretty decent vocab level, but I still had to look up a lot of words which interfered with immersion. I also just had several moments were I was confused about what was actually happening. They're all creatures, but I had a very hard time picturing what they looked like or how they seemingly evolved throughout the book.

Also, this book is incredibly gory and because so much of the gore directly deals with the evolution of the beings in the story—which I already was struggling with—I would read some sections several times over and still struggled with figuring out how the gory bits worked in relation to the monsters involved.

I don't know. I was just very confused by the end.

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yourbookishbff's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

If you're looking for a thoroughly macabre reimagining of The Little Mermaid and don't mind (or enjoy!) significant on-page body horror, this is an excellent novella. The story was imaginative and dark and calls back to the much grittier origins of our favorite fairytales. The writing is evocative and flowery (even in describing the rituals of a cannibalistic cult), and the epilogue was actually... sweet? That said, I almost set this aside at 20%, after realizing just how substantial the body horror elements were (I wasn't sure if I could manage another 60 pages). Ultimately, I pushed through because I appreciated the story arc and the thematic goal, and because I do like to read outside my typical genres occasionally. Recommended to horror readers who enjoy dark fairytale retellings!

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