Cassandra Khaw is one of the most skilled and exciting writers on the horror scene today. With past works, Khaw combines folklore with dense, poetic writing and dark folklore. With flawed and imperfect characters both undergoing and causing suffering, it feels like their previous works were simply practice for the masterpiece that is The Salt Grows Heavy.

Combining dark fantasy with the post-apocalyptic, the story is told from the point of view of one of folklore’s most ubiquitous creations: a mermaid. A being who acknowledges her myriad forms through different cultures, the mermaid has murdered her noble husband and burned his kingdom to ash. On the run, she is joined by a mysterious plague doctor with their own inner darkness. The two form a deep bond, discovering a village full of ageless, bloodthirsty children and those who control them.

The Salt Grows Heavy would collapse under the weight of the magnificent prose and beautiful language if not for Khaw's skill with the cast. Khaw provides a luxurious feast of character depth through the mermaid and the plague doctor. These are two people who need one another, but also two very dangerous and very disturbed individuals who will stop at nothing to survive. But they wish to survive together.

With little page time, Khaw constructs a compelling narrative out of well-trod fairytales and breaks them out to reveal the rot at the center. The carnage is vividly rendered, but never does Khaw forget this is a story of people. The mermaid and her plague doctor are dazzlingly, disturbingly human.

The Salt Grows Heavy is an enthralling book, a reminder that fairy tales still have teeth.

Holy hell I devoured this. I consumed every inch of this book and it left a hollow pit in my stomach longing for more.

I was skeptical prior to starting. I wasn’t a fan of Nothing But Blackened Teeth. But THIS!! This novella was divine.

The story follows a mermaid shortly after birthing two children and her journey with a plague doctor following escape from a vicious husband.

The depth to this story, I became so attached to the characters and their story, their development and their relationship. This is something I normally struggle with with novellas. Not this one. I loved every second of their story, and I crave more.

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The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw is possibly one of the prettiest but most gruesome books I've read. Khaw's writing is lyrical, verging on the purple side, but it works to enhance the horror of the scenes they paint. From opening the book by describing how a house looks like the empty bones of a body, to the dark and atmospheric painting of the world in which our characters are traveling. Khaw manages to show us both the horror and beauty of what's around.

The story itself is concise. A former queen, think a twisted Little Mermaid after she bore the Prince children and they turned out to be the horrors that she truly is, and a Plague Doctor are leaving the devastated realm her children destroyed and traveling to another. They find themselves in a village of children that is controlled and 'cared for' by a trio of Saints. We see the reflection of what violence and the search for immortality can do to a person and the victims it creates. Our mermaid is silenced, through violence perpetrated upon her by her husband, and over the course of the story she finds her voice again and becomes the master of her own story and heart.

As I stated the horror in this is intense, I wouldn't recommend this for the faint of heart. From a description to eating an eyeball to the sight of someone's insides leaking out their front, Khaw cuts no corners. My only complaint, in truth, has nothing to do with that. I almost never say this but the epilogue on this felt a bit too much, and unneeded. A tidy and sweet ending to a brutal and visceral story. Though I'm giving this one a high mark, I do wish that last little bit had been left to the reader to decide.

5 out of 5 Plague Masks

*MILD SPOILERS AHEAD!*

This was a weird book. I think that overall I enjoyed it, but it was fucking weird.

So, basically a mermaid falls in love with a plague doctor, and things go incredibly sideways for most of the middle of the book. It had some very Lord of the Flies/Peter Pan lost boys vibes, with this group of mostly pre-teen boys living in the wild with these three “Saints” who have shown them the way to everlasting life. It’s incredibly violent and traumatic, and fairly upsetting.

Despite the large amounts of violence and gore in this book, the ending was actually quite tender and lovely.

Cassandra Khaw is really writing some unique stories, and while they may not be entirely for me, I really appreciate what she’s doing and that she’s having success writing these sometimes rather bizarre stories.

If you liked Blackened Teeth, there’s no doubt you’ll enjoy The Salt Grows Heavy, which is a strange combination of The Little Mermaid meets Frankenstein. It’s not hard to see those Little Mermaid parallels, but this has nothing to do with the Disney tale. No, this is about the kind of mermaid that has sharpened teeth perfect for devouring flesh. Ariel could never.

There are also elements of the Frankenstein story here, and Khaw does not spare us the details. With each cut of the knife and prod of the needle, we experience the pain and euphoria of the saints' experiments. Like in Nothing But Blackened Teeth, the author paints a picture as horrible as it is astonishing. Never have I read such gruesome scenes rendered so elaborately intricate so as to make them almost alluring—except in a Cassandra Khaw book.

There are several morals of the story here, including what defines being a monster—as well as embracing that darkness inside of you. Surprisingly—but fittingly—this is also a love story of sorts, and I ultimately found the ending immensely satisfying. Though The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw won’t be for everyone, I encourage anyone who’s interested in horror and mythology to explore what this book has to offer. You’ll certainly never look at mermaids the same way again.

This little mermaid retelling is definitely not what I was expecting. In this retelling, or rather gruesome, fan-written sequel, the mermaid is reimagined as a bloodthirsty creature of the deep. This story also has elements of Lord of the Flies and Frankenstein. Classic horror fans would enjoy this. This was definitely thrilling and delightfully disturbing, but I found the narrative somewhat disjointed and difficult to follow. Khaw's vocabulary is incredibly sophisticated. Many times, I found myself running to dictionary.com, which definitely pulled me out of the story. Still, this was imaginative, creative, and fun.

Thanks to netgalley and tor for an arc in exchange for an honest review

“It is always interesting to see how often women are described as ravenous when it is the men who, without exception, take without thought of compensation.”

A mermaid has just ravaged her husband’s kingdom, when she takes up with a local plague doctor. They happen upon a strange village filled with children and three surgeons that call themselves Saints. A childish game goes awry when the children start killing each other. The children reassure the mermaid and doctor that there’s no problem, the children have to die to be resurrected by the Saints.

Cassandra Khaw writes *very* interesting books. I had trouble reading The All-Consuming World, Nothing but Blackened Teeth was a solid four-star read, and I absolutely fell in love with The Salt Grows Heavy.

It’s no secret that not only do I love mermaid stories, I love revenge stories. Even better when they’re queer. Even better when they’re bloody. Khaw adds a little of each to this novella to create something truly outstanding. The language they use is often poetic and intense, which really sucked me into this story. As often with novellas, there can be a feeling the story is rushed or not flushed out enough, but that’s not a problem here. I think the story is appropriately paced with a satisfying ending.

If you are hesitant to read Khaw, please give The Salt Grows Heavy a chance. I am glad I still have a backlog of their work to read. I’d love to see how their writing has evolved over time.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for the chance to read this advanced review copy.

CW for blood, body horror, violence, gore, death, fire, child death, grief, and animal death (minor)

4.5 stars - rounded up to 5 stars

I adored this short book way more than I expected I would when I decided to start it. Cassandra Khaw was able to weave a dark and mesmerizing fairytale like the original Grimm Fairy Tales. While a lot of this story had gruesome imagery her writing style was beautiful and lyrical weaving a beautiful image of a mermaid and a plague doctor on a journey together.

This book touches on dark side of mermaids and shows this mermaid, now on the run, escaping from her royal partner. She is not able to speak when she first interacts with the plague doctor and eventually you find out aspects of both of their backgrounds. The trauma of their lives bringing them together as they approach a town of blood thirsty children and their “saints” that protects them.

If you like dark fairy tales full of gruesome imagery and a strange accompaniment, I recommend this for you. It is also short and sweet so it is a quick and easy read!

A beautiful love story that is juxtaposed with a horrifying setting full of gore and cannibalism. This story was enthralling.

A very different outcome to the Little Mermaid tale. This mermaid lost everything when taken in by her prince. However, this story begins with her final acts of vengeance brought on by her bloodthirsty children as she leaves with her plague doctor.

They come across boys playing violently and follow them to a ramshackle town run by three saints. They have a very deceptive hold on these children, controlling them through fear and a god-like presence. The plague doctor and mermaid prepare to destroy these men before they can hurt more children.

This story is gross, and yet absolutely poignant and full of the most savory, lyrical writing, and more than anything, this story is full of a strong love and devotion between two people.

Definitely recommend this!

Out May 2, 2023!

I am a huge fan of "Nothing But Blackened Teeth" and this book will be taking a place right next to. It's dark and discomforting because it asks the readers to look at the dark parts of themselves. For that reason alone, I find great comfort in the story.

Unhappily ever after, this story starts where they usually end. More vivid imagery and vignettes than plot, Khaw revels in the gross and unspeakable. The situations are terrible but not terrifying. A good read for when you're in that spooky mood.

*3 stars but more like a 3 1/2 stars.*

This was definitely one of the most unique books i’ve read this year. I’d previously only read one other book by Cassandra Khaw and it was Nothing But Blackened Teeth. It was an okay story but it needed a bit more character development. This book is like the complete opposite. It is EXTREMELY detailed in more ways than one.

First off, the actual writing style of this. WOW. So complex, a lot of words that I don’t use on a day-to-day basis. You might need a dictionary while you read this. However, Khaw strings together long, beautiful pieces of writing. Her descriptions of gore and trauma are beautifully detailed. Sometimes, it does feel like she adds complicated words to some parts for no other reason than for it to sound fancy. Overall though, really nice.

Unfortunately, the actual plot of the story is what fell a little flat for me. This book has A LOT of different things going on. This book has everything that would have me excited: mermaids, plague doctors, cults, and body horror. However, i feel like the book should have been expanded into a bigger novel. Apparently, this is in the same universe as another piece of writing by Khaw. It’s possible I may have missed out on some background info before reading this book. It was just so many good ideas but I wanted so much more information from them. I loved the incorporation of mermaids and the reader is teased with bits of history about the character. I would have loved a whole book just on her and her story. Same thing in the case of the plague doctor. Their backstory is fascinating but I almost wished it was a separate story. I did enjoy the two characters’ relationship. It really has you rooting for them at the end.

Overall, I liked this but it’s not a love for me. I just wanted more information and more backstory. If you go into this for horror, the actual horror scenes are great. A lot of body horror and it is very detailed.

Once again, thank you to Netgalley and Tor Nightfire for the digital ARC of this.

HIGHLIGHTS
~the eyeballs of saints taste delicious
~be very suspicious of immortality
~do not fuck with mermaids

In 2021, I discovered Khaw via their novel The All-Consuming World – and fell head-over-heels in love with their incredibly decadent, luscious, shameless prose. I vowed then to read everything of theirs…even though they usually write hardcore horror, and as we know, I’m a horror wimp.

But with writing this beautiful, I am helpless to resist.

This is an odd little novella, which readers paying close attention will realise is set in the same world as Khaw’s short story These Deathless Bones – I can only hope this means Khaw plans to return to this world periodically, because I love it, but the Witch Bride does not herself appear in The Salt Grows Heavy, even though she’s refenced. (Alas. I suspect she’d have been an excellent ally to our main characters!) Regardless, in this book, a man-eating mermaid decides to wander the world for a time with a nonbinary plague doctor, whose admittedly mysterious origins still don’t come close to the darkly thrilling wonders of her own.

They encounter a cult whose practices the doctor does not approve of…and the two of them decide to intervene. For the doctor, it’s a Big Deal; for the mermaid, it’s a whim. Regardless, there are Consequences for everyone involved.

The stakes are life and death – and some kind of in-between immortality – but in this context those are still low stakes. The Salt Grows Heavy is not concerned with the fate of kingdoms; the story feels small – not petty or meaningless, but self-contained, isolated. Unlikely to affect anyone not present in its pages. I haven’t encountered books that feel like this very often, but it’s not unpleasant, just unfamiliar.

As for the story itself… A lot of it felt a little random, but I’m not sure if Things actually came out of nowhere, or if I just missed the set-up for them during one of those moments when I had to skim or skip ahead to avoid the worst of the body-horror elements. I had to do that quite a bit! Because as usual, Khaw holds nothing back in tenderly, lovingly describing the look of a person’s insides or the sensation (and taste) of an eyeball popping between one’s teeth.

I’LL PUT UP WITH A LOT FOR GORGEOUS PROSE, OKAY?

<Names are like selkie-skins, often carelessly attended, left in view of those who would misuse them. Utilized correctly, though, they can kill a man, can turn a girl to a thing of teeth and dead eyes, an appetite to devour worlds; can make infernos of maidens, phoenixes of bones who have been asleep for so long they’ve forgotten the shape of rage.

Names have so much power.>

And the prose is gorgeous – lush and rich and decadent, and wiser people than me should put together an essay on how much more viscerally horrifying horror becomes when it’s made beautiful; the dissonance of it, the way it seduces the reader, slyly transforming them from passive onlooker to almost-active participant. When you make horror beautiful, you make the reader want the horror – and that in itself is far more horrifying than anything that can happen on page. It moves the horror from the book into the reader. It turns the reader into a monster too, for the length of the story.

I am pretty sure Khaw knows this, and revels in it. They’re certainly a master at it!

Surprising no one, I’m sure, my favourite parts of The Salt Grow Heavy were the moments when we got mermaid lore. Khaw gives us just enough to establish how very un- and inhuman their mermaids are; enough to make me long for more. I would have been so happy to read the mermaid’s backstory; her life in the ocean, her leaving the water, burning down the kingdom that tried to cage her. We get very brief not-quite-flashbacks to her life with the king who made her tongueless, but the focus is very much post-fairytale, not the retelling that came before.

<I allow myself, for the gash of a moment, to remember what I once possessed: the abyssal ocean the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god; the searing colors moting my sisters’ coils, sapphire and quartz crushed into constellations, patterns prisms of incandescence spiraling through the dark, our tails in endless, restless motion; our mother’s eyes, colossal, phosphorescent; our father’s ribs, still studded with our egg sacs, his heartbeat in our veins. I’d been happy there. I could have been happy there forever.>

In the Acknowledgements (in the arc, anyway – it’s perfectly possible they might change in the final copy) Khaw describes The Salt Grows Heavy as ‘about people who won’t give up on each other, who stay even when the world crumbles to ash, who hold on even when there’s nothing but hope.’ I admit, this puzzled me a little, because the love story that develops here seemed very sudden to me, not something that was central to the book.

But again, who knows what I missed all those times I flinched from the horror? And I’m not the best at understanding romance anyway.

In short…this is an odd little book. I think it’s one I need to reread, maybe several times, before I understand it fully – but it’s such a darkly beautiful read that I really don’t mind at all.

Take my thoughts with – ahem – a pinch of salt, since I fully acknowledge I probably missed things. But I did love this, and I’m glad I read it, and I’ll be happy to reread it. It’s definitely, easily my second-favourite book of Khaw’s (it’s going to be tough to beat All-Consuming World) and I strongly recommend it to anyone looking for a short but breathtaking read that might just tear your heart out of your chest.

Get your dictionaries ready because this one is a challenge and a delight to decipher. I enjoyed being inside this strange and scary yet somehow a little familiar world, but I just wanted it to be a little more fleshed out.

Phenomenal.

The Little Mermaid meets Frankenstein.

A story of love found, lost, and found again. A story of possession taken and given freely.

Dark and bloody and lovely.

A mermaid and a plague doctor go on a journey, I don't actually recall why and I don't think much really happens. I understand it's supposed to be only three days-worth of a journey, but nothing really moves the story forward. The only journey taken, really, is the journey you take within a sentence as there are inconsistencies where some of the dialogue is elaborate and some is very plain, for no apparent reason.
This book asks "what if words were meaningless?" as there really is no rhyme or reason for the author's wording. I'll leave you with a simple example, the main character's traveling companion is dressed as a plague doc. At one point, she mentions that he makes a sound that echoes in the keratin of his mask or something. Not only would keratin be an unnecessary replacement of the word "bone", keratin isn't even a major component of bone.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher, but this was not really for me.

Though the writing style was not for me, I was still very much drawn into the dark and gory world of the mermaid-like creature and plague doctor. I very much appreciated the use of singular they/them for the plague doctor, and enjoy seeing the two characters bond through the novella. For reader’s advisory, I can definitely see myself recommending this to patrons who enjoy horror or dark twists on fairytales/folklore.

Imaginative, dark, and gorgeous, this is a lush little book with teeth. Greatly enjoyed, devoured in one gulp.

This was a bit of a mixed bag for me. On one hand, I really loved the idea of reimagining THE LITTLE MERMAID as a dark fantasy body horror gorefest. I am always down for new interpretations of old stories, and Khaw has made such a fascinating and, frankly, disgusting (in a good way!) retelling of the classic tale that I am VERY tickled by the results. This novella is one of the most grotesque things I've read in recent memory, and I say that with only affection and as a high compliment because Khaw's descriptions are powerful and disgusting in the ways you want from body horror. But on the other hand, the writing style was VERY flowery and purple prose-like, and as a personal preference these kinds of language and literary choices are very hard for me. It also felt like we jumped into the story about half way through the narrative, and I would have liked to see a bit more exploration of the actual LITTLE MERMAID tale as opposed to picking up after that had fallen apart.

Body horror fans will find a lot to like with THE SALT GROWS HEAVY, assuming that the flowery language doesn't throw up a road block like it did for me. I acknowledge that's more based on my own preferences, though, so take that as you will.

The synopsis for this book is understandably difficult to nail. I think people may be confused by it. I think all you need to know is that this is a lush fairy tale that goes dark.

This is a difficult book to rate. I didn’t enjoy being dropped into the story abruptly with very little introduction to the characters or the world. The writing is flowery and literary. This definitely leans toward fantasy horror. It’s not what I was expecting. This had some incredibly described body horror as well. Though I didn’t love the beginning, once I got used to the writing I kept going and the ending will definitely stick with me. In fact the ending pulled me from a 2.5 to a 4. So my advice would be, if you’re having trouble with this just keep reading. It all comes together in the end.