After murdering her husband and burning his kingdom to cinders, a mermaid joins a strange doctor on a journey through the eerie taiga. Deep in the woods, the pair stumble upon a village, full of seemingly ageless children and the three surgeons who oversee them―called only “the saints.”
After discovering the villagers’ taste for a sinister blood sport, the mermaid and her companion must embrace the darkest parts of their true nature, if they hope to survive.
In The Salt Grows Heavy, Cassandra Khaw creates a dark, hungry world. It’s the kind of world where the mermaids are abyssal creatures, far from the ones in our own fairy tales, and where magic always has a dark price. And yet, for all the horrific violence contained in these pages, I found a surprising amount of love and heart in this brief novella...
I loved this and I needed to sit with it a while after I finished, before starting my next book. It's a body-horror/fairytale/love story between a 'mermaid' on land and her (plague) doctor, as they intervene in a morbid cult run by three false saints. It's like nothing I've read before (okay, maybe it's a bit T. Kingfisher-y - a good thing) and it's really beautifully written.
I quite enjoyed this dark fairy tale / body horror novella about the relationship between a mermaid and a plague doctor, as they investigate mysterious violent children in the woods in the thrall of three surgeon saints. I enjoyed the prose quite a bit, but I am also a sucker for stories about monsters and bodies, broken and (re)constructed.
(Also seriously though, I will content warn for on page violence, death, and gore. Various characters are eviscerated several times on page.)
It's possible that I'm slow on the uptake, and so I didn't twig to the fact that the mermaid in The Salt Grows Heavy having her tongue cut out (losing her voice, in other words) was a riff on the little mermaid story. This short …
I quite enjoyed this dark fairy tale / body horror novella about the relationship between a mermaid and a plague doctor, as they investigate mysterious violent children in the woods in the thrall of three surgeon saints. I enjoyed the prose quite a bit, but I am also a sucker for stories about monsters and bodies, broken and (re)constructed.
(Also seriously though, I will content warn for on page violence, death, and gore. Various characters are eviscerated several times on page.)
It's possible that I'm slow on the uptake, and so I didn't twig to the fact that the mermaid in The Salt Grows Heavy having her tongue cut out (losing her voice, in other words) was a riff on the little mermaid story. This short story prequel is much more obviously a retelling of that story. In my opinion, it can be read after or before The Salt Grows Heavy. It's got a similar tone (body horror, fairy tale vibes) but a different thematic focus.
