Book Review: “The Salt Grows Heavy”, by Cassandra Khaw

Reading time: 2 mins

“The powerful have always made meals of the small.”




★★★☆☆

Dark as the deep ocean which the light can’t caress, Cassandra Khaw’s The Salt Grows Heavy stunned me.

“Myths are full of lies. This is not one of them.”

Centuries ago, there was a prince. His kingdom was one of the most peaceful around him, and still he couldn’t rest, because he was in lack of heirs and a wife. Now, if you’ve read some Grimm’s fairytales, what will follow won’t surprise you: the prince stole a mermaid from the sea, killed her sisters, wed her, and imprisoned her in a tower. The end.

Except that our story starts after that delightful intro.

The mermaid’s spawns devoured their kingdom and its inhabitants. We find our protagonist in the midst of a decision: what to do now, where to be. She’ll join a plague doctor on their journey to the next kingdom, where she will likely start the fairytale all over again.

Except that her plans get ruined by what they’ll find in the shadows of a wintery forest.

“Come, come and bear witness to the slaughter.”

I didn’t expect to go from gore to gore in my readings, so if this is too much for you, I’d suggest skipping this novella and checking Kane out (review to be published tomorrow).

Because you’ll never be prepared for what you’ll find in its pages.

And I have to admit, because of how graphic it was, it made me feel uneasy. Which is actually brilliant – I wouldn’t say that Cassandra Khaw delivered, I’d say that she knows her way around words so well, she’ll work you like a puppet. Its presence flirts with the line between being necessary and superfluous, but I wouldn’t have imagined the book without the horror – that’s what makes the novella so crude and real. The fact that the author can manipulate your feelings through words is also reflected in her style, which put me off – it seems like she is trying way too hard. Being this my first book of hers, I don’t know if that’s the case, but I do know that I often skim-read the most densely high register parts.

“I did not know that saints could weep.”

The theme of the story is as old as time – the power of some will deceive and exploit the weak, making them worship a lie. I won’t say much more, not to give the plot away.

Another important knot in the story is the power of myth, fairytales, and their importance in human history. That the book was written with a style trying to reflect it, was a work of art.

Final Thoughts

Gore to the core and unapologetically so, The Salt Grows Heavy is an old-fashioned tale with thematics that will ring true for all eras, and with a delightful subplot that will move you to tears. That’s actually one of the aspects in which I thought the style of the author didn’t rob the story of anything, but enriched it beyond measure.

Certain stories are recounted so many times that they become parched of meaning, stories like those concerning the girl and her wolf in the woods, the cinder-smudged princess, the monstrous beauty who vomits pearls with every sob.

Others, however, are kept from taverns and wine-warmed conversations, catalogued but rarely recited. Complicated stories with no easy ending, stories that remind us karmic debt is a contrivance of despair, that there is nothing fair or sweet about this world.

The tale of how some children played slaughtering together is one of them.

The story of the three army surgeons is another.