Book: The Salt Grows Heavy
Author: Cassandra Khaw
Publisher: Nightfire – Tor Publishing Group
Year: 2023
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Synopsis: “Certain stories are recounted so many times that they becomes parched of meaning. Others, however, are kept from wine-warmed conversations, catalogued but rarely recited. Complicated stories with no easy ending, stories that remind us karmic debt is a contrivance of despair, that there is nothing fear or sweet about this world. This is one of those stories.”

Review: I almost didn’t write this review. I read the book, I was enthralled, I was mesmerized, I was horrified, and then I was disappointed. I put The Salt Grows Heavy down, fully intending to walk away from it without reviewing it, but something about it kept pulling me back. I had to review it. I had to give it the space to be seen. Be forewarned, this one is odd; perhaps in the best possible ways, perhaps in the worst.

Khaw, in her letter to the reader, explains that TSGH was birthed from the question “what would happen if Ariel laid eggs?” and that’s possibly all you need to know before diving into this one. It’s short, a quick read, but it delves into themes of body horror, bodily autonomy, and existential dread. This novella is graphic, pointed, and poetic. I stopped short of giving it five full stars because of the disappointment I felt over the ending, but we’ll get into that. It is masterfully written with Khaw driving the plot forward, never mincing words, never adding detail that didn’t serve a purpose, all the while turning a disney fairytale into a twisted brothers Grimm tale.

The Salt Grows Heavy begins with a mermaid-eque creature leaving the kingdom she calls home, though it is notably not her home, after her clutch of daughters hatch from their eggs, eat the king, and subsequently eat the entire kingdom (sparing a precious few). Unable to speak because of an injury incurred by the Prince, as many Grimm and folktales go, we find the protagonist-mermaid leaving the kingdom with the Prince’s plague doctor, one of the only remaining survivors of the hatchling’s apocalypse, uncertain of where she’s headed. As they leave together, they burn the entire kingdom to ash, the plague doctor remarking “What’s the point of revenge if you can’t enjoy it?”.

Spoilers Ahead

As the unlikely pair leaves together, they get no further than a strange, cobbled together village of wildlings, children who systematically and routinely kill each other for sport, only to be rebuilt and recreated by their saints – a trio of physicians who have mastered the art of bringing creatures back from the dead…seemingly. The mermaid and the plague doctor are both horrified, though we come to learn that this horror stems from two distinct places. From the mermaid, she seeks to prove the physicians wrong; having had her own tongue cut out of her mouth by the Prince, her teeth removed, and her sisters slain, she feels a sense of purpose amongst these “saints” and the children they seek to rebuild over and over again. However, the plague doctor, who until this point has never removed his mask, experiences horror for other reasons entirely. As they and the mermaid grow closer, we are offered a glimpse behind the mask only to find that the entirety of the plague doctor’s body has been stitched back together, unable to die, unable to discern any form of gender, a blending of hundreds of parts. In fact, they were the saint’s first project.

The Plague doctor begs the mermaid to allow them to stay behind, to bring wrath upon the saints, and to free the children from their menacing grasp. As this is not a long book, these events happen quickly and before long the mermaid and the plague doctor are discovered by the saints, tracked and attempted to be killed. We come to realize that the mermaid is much heartier than the mermaids of Walt Disney’s imagination and can regenerate nearly at will. The plague doctor, because of their many differing parts, is almost unable to be killed, but they are, after all, still human. As the plague doctor reaches the end of their life, they once more beg the mermaid to allow them to die – to attain the one thing the saints have kept from them for a completely unknown number of years, iterations, and science projects that have kept them alive and uncertain of who they are.

The mermaid allows the plague doctor to die, she kills the saints, and then in epilogue, she resurrects the plague doctor because she’s in love with them. And this. THIS is where I take issue. In a book that is entirely about bodily autonomy, how these creatures have had zero say over their bodies and minds for lifetimes, Khaw chooses to posit that love is more important. She distorts the message of the book, completely does away with the autonomy of the plague doctor, a character who has been (pun not intended) plagued by rebirths and regenerations for so many lifetimes that they cease to understand who they are at all, for the sake of love. I think Khaw misses the mark when it comes to the execution of this book. In her letter to the reader she says, “It’s my love letter to the people who can’t and won’t give up. Who love the end of days. Who love like it is the end of days, and there’s nothing left to lose. It’s my nod to love that comes when you’ve given up, when you’ve concluded that’s it, there’s nothing left.” Personally, I don’t find this book to meet that thesis at all. I think Khaw has written a masterful book full of hard hitting and timely messages, and she throws it all away at the end for the sake of selfish love that cannot allow someone the autonomy to choose to die.

Advice: If you’re looking for a body horror book, this is it. If you like something to move at a quick pace, not take too many pages, and still hit hard, this is it! If, however, you cannot help but analyze a book, see where it went wrong, and find frustration over it, I suspect you’ll find, like I did, that this is not it. If you don’t enjoy gore or graphic violence, this will probably be one you’ll want to skip.