![]() ![]() Mermaids, Medusa, harpies, the wicked witch, selkies and more. She is ‘ the mother of monsters,’ and as mythologist Marina Warner points out, monsters in myth are often women. Myths to make my captivity more palatable.’ The story opens where the short story had concluded, with the narrator’s children having been born and gruesomely eaten everyone in the kingdom, save for a lonely plague doctor (I absolutely adore the plague doctor and enjoy the representation of they/them pronouns used for them). The myths around mermaids, we learn, are ‘ lies, all of them. Told from the perspective of a mermaid, we find her mute as a result of her wedding a prince on his ascent to the throne as in the familiar story, yet here the circumstances are much more sinister. The story takes a thematic root in The Little Mermaid and all its variations beyond Hans Christian Andersen’s tale. ‘ There is nothing wrong with being a monster.’ It would be overly gross if it wasn’t so genuinely poetic. Her phrasing and imagery is darkly dazzling as well, with ‘ the night-bruised sea,’ a beseeching boy is described as ‘ ‘a priest at the death of time, evangelizing for a heaven long crumbled into nostalgia,’ or fear as ‘ like a second heart beating itself to death against your temples, like love, like something not unlike love.’ Plus, Khaw can write some truly visceral violence. I admittedly had to look up a few words, and she uses large or antiquated and numinously-infused terms with a finesse usually associated with Cormac McCarthy. It is like a gothic cathedral with the most horrific of gargoyles, sturdy and and awe-inspiring yet ferocious and frightening. Some may call it over-written, and I won’t argue despite loving it, though I’d argue against it being indulgent as it is consistent and grants the story such a darkly ornate and threatening atmosphere essential to the tale. Khaw writes in such an impressive and vast thematic lexicon that feels as otherworldly as it is grotesque. It is a violent story, but the telling of it will grab you by the throat and you’ll dare not look away. Effectively a sequel to her earlier short story And In Our Daughters, We Find a Voice (you can read it here, though it is included at the end of the book), Khaw delivers an excellent frightfest and dynamic world-building in just 100pgs. This is not a story for the feint of heart and has teeth as sharp as the mermaids within it. ‘ here is nothing fair or sweet about this world.’ Utterly impossible to put down, The Salt Grows Heavy is a ghastly and gruesome tale told in gorgeous, lyrical prose as if from the choirs of hell.įor maximum enjoyment, listen to Mermaids by Florence + the Machine along with the review. From the ashes of a kingdom devoured by the mouths of mermaids born to a king and his living myth turned chattel and status symbol to a mysterious cult deep in the forests of the taiga, Khaw sends us shivering along with our mermaid narrator and her companion, a genderless plague doctor where magic and myth buts against morality. The stories from which nightmares are born. Stories that silence or demonize those who’d dare raise a voice against them, stories that turn heads away from abuse, stories that allow evil to roam and have altars erected in its name. Though in the wake of all the grisly deaths scattering corpses across the narrative, the darkest terrors are those who wield parasitic power over others and retain it through ‘ weaponized stories’. The Salt Grows Heavy, the vicious and bewitching body horror novella by Cassandra Khaw, is full of the stuff of myths from mermaids to necromancy. They pass on lessons, they can be ‘ a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor,’ as fairy tale expert Jack Zipes wrote, but they can also uphold power and enforce standards. ‘ The powerful have always made meals of the small.’ ![]()
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