After the little mermaid’s children eat their father and burn down the kingdom, she goes on an adventure with an enby plague doctor. 

That is really all that needs to be said to get this book on your TBR, but if you need more convincing, I’ll indulge you.

The Salt Grows Heavy is the newest novella from Cassandra Khaw. You may have heard of their previous novella, Nothing But Blackened Teeth. I actually wrote up a big blog post defending that book from its 2.8 Goodreads score, then decided no one has time for that, but suffice to say if you were put off by the unlikable characters or thick prose, this one doesn’t have the former problem and not as much as the latter.

It would be fair to assume that you’ll accuse me of being a liar within the first ten pages of The Salt Grows Heavy, but let me assure you, after an opening I had to read twice to make sense of, the book becomes much more straightforward. In fact it really reminds me in a way of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber kind of fairy tail retelling or the surreal journey of In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt. Its unpleasant, but you can’t look away.

At only 112 pages, The Salt Grows Heavy is a quick read, but also a  visceral one. The mermaid is a Lovecraftian horror who can eat men whole. The plague doctor is a construct created by mad men in their pursuit of immortality. They encounter a cult who live, die, resurrect and swap body parts. There is a lot of body horror, and Khaw uses their stylistic prose to maximize the grotesque. 

One thing I really like about it is that with fairy tale reinterpretations it is very tempting to be cynical about it. The mermaid could have decided she needed no one and let that be the object lesson, to teach the reader that romance is for the naive. But Khaw allows the mermaid some sentimentality as her relationship with the plague doctor grows, and in the end it is a sweet, if at times gross, story.

If you enjoy fairy tale re-imaginings, plague doctors and heavy metal in literary form, this is a novella for you.

Megan C