Doug Bolden's Reviews > The Salt Grows Heavy

Review Summary: A pitch-black fairy-tale that attempts to get back to the teeth of old fairy stories — and why we might have once feared mermaids despite contemporary versions tending to lean towards love and friendship. Goes hard and then harder and washes up a shore so darkly sharp that it is practically surreal. Probably for people who have dressed as Brom artwork for Halloween, consider Mork Borg to be the right level of edgy RPG for beginners, or have a deep fondness of their well-worn Tanith Lee paperbacks from back in the day. Maybe that's you. Read and find out.

Content Warning: Lots of biting, chewing, and vivisection...including of children. Most other horrors are brief.

=== Review ===

There was a time in my youth (which seems less ironic to say now that my beard is nearly all white) where there a certain fancy towards dark renditions of classic fairy tales. Snow White with axes and guts and lots of teeth-filled — and toothsome — fairies (and various reminders that Sleeping Beauty was a story about sexual assault). It was an punching up towards the Disney motif of happily ever after and commercialization, but somewhat misguided in that historically fairy tales are themselves largely dark. The pied piper does not take the kids out for ice cream and sodas. When Thomas Ligotti reconfigured the Peter Pan story with "Frolic," he was merely tapping into the standard story of fairy abduction: beyond the ken of mortal men lies madness and the loss of self, sometimes bloodily and maddeningly. Whether the traditional story of "The Little Mermaid" can be understood as happy depends a lot on to what degree you consider dying of grief (or suicide) is happy.

This is not to detract from Cassandra Khaw's The Salt Grows Heavy, a novella very much in the 80s & 90s tradition of revisisting classic stories with a paint brush full of viscera and a wordplay towards reevaluation. It is a quite good take upon those themes, reminding the reader that mermaids would not have been hunted and feared if they were merely busty lasses waiting to fall in love with any manner of sailors at first sight. The old mermaid stories (see also: sirens, sealwives, etc etc) are just another version of that strange, inexplicable truth: stories about sea creatures and humans interacting seem to invariably be about sex and death. Not even the ultimately sexless author H. P. Lovecraft* avoided it. It feels inevitable.

Partially this book is good because it is too short to ever slow down and Khaw can write the story exactly as expansive as it needs to be without spending to long tying any threads back together. Starting with the devouring of a kingdom's people by a clutch of the Mermaid's daughters, it then shifts to a short, aimless drift by the Mermaid and her companion, a Plague Doctor who is also another creature from literary legend. Shortly thereafter they come across a village of tortured but seemingly immortal children whose simple price to pay for their ability to deny death is a systematic series of surgeries, deaths, and allegiances to a trio called "The Saints". Doctors pushing the edge of science by carving life into, and out of, the children's painful existences.

Here it becomes, basically, a story about revenge until it is a story about love and there is no good way to rectify the events that occur besides to simply let them flow over you like a room full of blacklight posters and dragon skull kitsch. There are times where Khaw seems to slightly backtrack from established reality to tweak a detail or two as necessary for the next story point. Whether or not this is on purpose it barely matters. The book is one extended literary present. All the matters is the spectacle on display at any given time. Rough, painful, occasionally heroic, ultimately the understated romance becomes the core.

This is a novel about outcasts and found family. You could analyze it for queer themes. You could suggest it is a story about serving up empty dreams of the future to youth so that the current status quo could maintain profit margins off the backs (and eyes, and entrails) of their young bodies. It is this. It is not this. It is a type of revenge fantasy where consequences are for the norms. Escapism that smells of road kill. The kind of book you are sure your grandmother could never fathom (never count granny out, though, she read the fairy tales before Disney stole them).

It made me feel somewhat young again. I liked it. I do not necessarily want the trope of bloody fairy tales to return but in a world where Redditors consider themselves smart for trying to talk some madness about why mermaids, little or otherwise, could never be black it is good to remember that most of them would have been covered in kelp and blood. No one owns these stories. To think otherwise is a weird collective egoism.

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* Apparently he was a perfectly adequate lover for the short time he was married, so not entirely sexless in the flesh, just the page.