Novella Review: The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.

The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

Mogsy’s Rating: 2 of 5 stars

Genre: Horror

Series: Stand Alone

Publisher: Nightfire (May 2, 2023)

Length: 106 pages

Author Information: Website | Twitter

On the surface, this story may seem familiar: A mermaid gives up her voice to marry a human prince and be a part of his world. But the twist is so much darker and macabre in The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw, a blood-drenched reimagining of this fairy tale classic.

As the book opens, the main character begins by remembering her tragic past as she travels with a companion, a plague doctor, through a snow-covered forest. Far from her ocean home, the mermaid recounts the way she was forcibly claimed by a selfish prince, who cut out her tongue so that she could not speak. But then their children were born, and our mermaid had the last laugh. Her bloodthirsty and ravenous daughters ended up devouring all the humans and burned the prince’s kingdom to the ground, releasing the mermaid from her imprisonment.

Now our protagonist is on the lam, with the somber plague doctor who is also running from a dark past. Somewhere along their journey, they come upon a village where they witness a group of children seemingly at play, until the games turn deadly. The mermaid and the plague doctor soon discover that the village is headed by a trio of self-professed surgeon-saints who claim to hold the key to immortality. As more terrible revelations come to light, the new trust forged between our two friends is put to the test as their mission swiftly shifts to survival.

To be perfectly blunt, I did not care for this book, and while the reasons are bigger than the issues I have with novellas in general, I’m sure they played a part as well. For one thing, I found it grossly over-written, not even all that subtly in certain places where scenes are being intentionally padded. The resulting prose felt unpleasantly dense and impenetrable, as evidenced by the inordinate amount of time it took me to get through this slim volume which only clocks in at slightly over one hundred pages.

Ironically, I doubt Khaw was hurting for content. The story had plenty of areas the author could have explored or developed further, but Khaw chose to place greater emphasis on descriptive imagery. And hey, if that’s what you’re into, then great—you’ll probably have a much better time than I did with The Salt Grows Heavy. Personally, I would have preferred to see more substance especially with regards to plot and characters, or else it simply feels pretentious and a bit try-hard. Because when you cut away all the flowery words, the story you are left with is actually quite lean and astonishingly simplistic. Even the horror is diluted by the purple prose, which I found most frustrating. At the end of it all, I just wanted to scream, “But it could have been so much more!”

And speaking of unrealized potential, we have the characters and their unique relationship. Individually, both the mermaid and the plague doctor were sufficiently well written and interesting. Together as a team, they should have been glorious. However, I had a hard time being convinced of the beautiful bond they’d supposedly formed during their ordeal, again because all the good stuff was simply lost amidst the ham-fisted metaphors and million-dollar words.

To be fair, I’m probably not the target audience for a book like this, and I’d figured this out about a dozen pages in but decided to continue anyway because that was already a good chunk of this bite-sized novella. If you are a prose junkie with an affinity for lyrical, almost poetic writing styles or would like a chance to expand your vocabulary, The Salt Grows Heavy could work for you. But if on the other hand you are a reader who prefers plot-driven and character-focused stories, I feel it is weaker in those areas.