A review by thereadingrambler
The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

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

5.0

This is one of those books I checked out as a library book, but now I want to buy a physical copy because I want to highlight passages. So I'll start out my review with a passage so beautiful I had to read it out loud to my cat so I could educate him: 

That I want to die here, mired in the cold. That I want to race them to Death's carriage, exceeding their pace but only just, never going so far as to be unable to turn and corset their fingers in mine. That eternity is a worthless bauble without their conversation. That I would follow them into the demise of the universe where every heaven and each hell is shuttered, and there is nothing of us but motings of wan light, and ther eis no bodily apparatus with which to express affection, no recourse save to glow weakly in worship until at last, such things are swallowed too by the dark. 
That I would love them even then.
As long as a moiety of conscious thought presists, I will love them.
I will love them to the death of days. 

The book is a retelling of The Little Mermaid, and like all retellings of that fairy tale, there is the dark route and the happy ending route. For any who doesn't know, in many of the original versions of mermaid-turns-human legends, the mermaid suffers greatly for being on land. And then there is the Disney version. Attendant to that is the other legends of mermaids, selkies, sirens, etc., who are said to lure men to their deaths, destroy ships, and otherwise wreak general havoc. Based on the inside flap, I was expecting something along the lines of The Deep by Rivers Solomon or even Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant. What I was not expecting was a book with the level of emotional intensity evidenced in the passage I quoted above. This book was raw, powerful, heartbreaking, and oddly hopeful (at least in its final pages).

Don't mistake the lyricism for a book that is a light or happy read. Although this book is barely over 100 pages, I still marked it as having a slow pace because, first, some people will probably find the language difficult—Khaw does not shy away from using every ten-dollar word they know (excitingly, I had to look up to words: sapidity and bathyal)—and, second, the book is gory and delights in being so. As I said above, Khaw has chosen to write about mermaids who destroy and who are hungry, so our narrator (the mermaid) gives us detailed descriptions of her meals. This could definitely be off-putting for some readers, but keep in mind this is a horror novella. I found the beautiful and eloquent language (something another character comments on) paired with the grotesquerie to capture something about the world of the book and the character quite perfectly. I am always entranced when the language of a book perfectly fits the rest of the book that the reader cannot help but be pulled (or dragged) in.

But the above quote and my emotional response point to something more than just a dark mermaid fable. The mermaid has a companion, the plague doctor, and it is their relationship that is the source of my intense emotional response. I only give books five stars that have evoked an extremely strong emotional reaction in me, and I had tears on my face at the end of this book. Their relationship (and don't read too much romance into my use of the term "relationship" here) is so exquisite and beautiful. This is a story, at the core, about people trying to protect, love, help, and support each other through the worst the world can throw at them and through their private struggles and traumas. I won't say more; the book is so short, giving really any plot details would spoil the whole thing pretty quickly.

The Salt Grows Heavy does what I always want my horror to do: Give me a scary monster that only ever hides a true horror from our daily lives. But this little novella also forces you to question what makes a monster and what actions can be excused and why. If you like emotionally and psychologically complex horror, I definitely recommend this book. Stay away if you're disturbed by body horror or horror involving children. 
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