Book Review: THE SALT GROWS HEAVY

TITLE: The Salt Grows Heavy

AUTHOR: Cassandra Khaw

106 pages, Tor Nightfire, ISBN 9781250830913 (hardcover, e-book, audiobook)

MY RATING:  4 stars out of 5

The Salt Grows Heavy cements Cassandra Khaw as one of the modern masters of the horror novella. Tonally, the book is very different from Khaw’s magnificent, ethereal 2021 novella Nothing but Blackened Teeth, which just proves the author’s range, as both books kept me engrossed through very different means.

Salt is narrated by a mermaid who married a king, but this is no happily-ever-after tale. The King has tortured his wife (including cutting out her tongue) and forced her to bear his daughters who, just prior to the start of the novella, have devoured their father, his court, and most of his kingdom. Among the survivors are the now-free mermaid and the court’s mysterious non-binary Plague Doctor, who flee the castle in search of safe haven. Which, this being a horror novella, they do not find, encountering instead a group of nearly feral children and the men they worship as gods. And this is when the story gets really disturbing.

The mermaid’s narrative voice is lush and detailed, bordering on archaic, while still being relatable to the modern reader. The weight of her experiences at her husband’s hands, the pride and fear she expressed about her daughters, inform every sentence. The developing bond between mermaid queen and plague doctor as they learn each other’s secrets, is the beautiful core of an otherwise horrific and bloody story; the fits and starts of awkward mutual attraction are so real that I recognized myself in each moment. But fair warning: this is not a cozy romance. The mermaid also narrates, in visceral detail, moments of brutal body horror that disturbed me even while I was unable to look away. The mermaid and the Plague Doctor each have experienced debilitating trauma at the hands of people who should have cared for them, through which the author explores the abuses of power endemic to so many fairy tales.

In The Salt Grows Heavy, Cassandra Khaw comingles threads and themes from fairy tales both famous (The Little Mermaid) and less-so (The Three Army Surgeons), along with works as seminal as Frankenstein and The Lord of the Flies – a combination which in lesser hands maybe would not work, but in Khaw’s hands becomes a vessel for exploring othering, outsidership, and the myriad ways in which we find ourselves controlled and confined.

I received an electronic advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. The Salt Grows Heavy was published on May 2, 2023

Book Review: NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH

TITLE: Nothing but Blackened Teeth

AUTHOR: Cassandra Khaw

128 pages, Tor Nightfire, ISBN 9781250759412 (hardcover, also in e-book and audio)

DESCRIPTION: (from the publisher): A Heian-era mansion stands abandoned, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company.

It’s the perfect wedding venue for a group of thrill-seeking friends.

But a night of food, drinks, and games quickly spirals into a nightmare. For lurking in the shadows is the ghost bride with a black smile and a hungry heart.

And she gets lonely down there in the dirt.

MY RATING: 4 stars out of 5

MY THOUGHTS: Cassandra Khaw’s novella Nothing but Blackened Teeth is lushy written, full of physical and sensory detail. The horror starts out subtle – just a whisper the narrator thinks she hears – and by the time it turns obvious the reader knows more about the characters involved than they probably realize about themselves.

Narrator Cat is unsure of her place in a group of friends she used to lead, back when they were a sort of “Scooby gang” investigating haunted houses, abandoned hospitals, and any sewage pipe large enough for a body to crawl down. She’s been absent from the group for several months, working on her own problems, and has been drawn out to attend a wedding of two other members of the group (Faiz and Nadia) organized by a fourth member (Philip). There’s some question about whether the fifth member of their group, Lin, is even going to show up. There are a lot of dynamics at play here: the characters either seem to like each other too much or not at all, and their interpersonal histories turn out to be easy for the ghost haunting the house to use to her own ends. I must admit, I didn’t find any of these characters particularly likeable. They’ve all treated each other badly in the past and in the present. But I’m a firm believer that you don’t need to like everyone – or even anyone – in a horror story. I enjoyed watching their personal issues play out against a growing sense that the evening spent in this house is not going to turn out well for some, if not all, of them.

The house itself is just as much of a character as the group of friends renting it, and Khaw’s descriptions of the rooms the characters move through are at turns beautiful and disturbing, especially as the actual threat – the ghostly bride and those that surround her – become more apparent. At points, the mansion reminded me of the house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves: hidden depths, extra hallways and rooms that endlessly loop on each other, that aren’t discovered unless an occupant makes just the right turn at just the right time, none of which are visible from the mundane exterior of the building.

Nothing But Blackened Teeth is a fast-moving but deeply immersive reading experience in which a group of unhappy people barrel blindly towards an overwhelming supernatural presence. To say too much more would be to spoil the twists the story takes.

I received an electronic advance reading copy from the publisher via NetGalley, although this review is long over-due.