In The Salt Grows Heavy, a bloody new novella that weds a macabre love story with a sinister reimagining of several fairy tales, Cassandra Khaw makes the internal external. I mean this in the narrative sense, in that the story’s outward conflicts reflect the inner lives of the characters. But I also mean it in the literal sense, in that these same characters have their flesh peeled back, their bones separated, and their still-pulsating internal organs cut out and dunked into jars of fluid. Deconstructive retellings of fairy tales and mythology are a popular and pervasive subgenre, but it’s rarer to find an author who vivisects archetypes and bodies in the same paragraph. So much the better if that author takes to their work as vigorously as Khaw, who grafts new flesh onto the spare, sturdy bones of old stories with all the glee of an ambitious Cenobite.

Our main protagonist is a ravenous sea creature, sometimes labeled a mermaid, recently forced into the role of a princess, but stubbornly insistent on safeguarding an identity that is more protean, more resistant to the categories imposed by her human captors. The word “mermaid,” she tells us, “ … demonstrates the ineptitude of human language, and the species’ predisposition for infantilizing the unknown” (p. 72).

Our secondary protagonist is a plague doctor of indeterminate gender, their body a patchwork of parts, held together by fine stitching that is often concealed by a mask, robes, and a broad-brimmed hat. They have taken a liking to the mermaid during her captivity, recognizing a kindred spirit: “We are both manufactured beings,” the doctor tells her (p. 12).

The curtain rises on this pair, conversing in the ruins of a kingdom reduced to bones and ashes. Salt is a continuation of Khaw’s 2016 short story “And In Our Daughters, We Find a Voice,” a nasty little jewel that is worth your time [1]. In “Daughters,” Khaw repurposes Hans Christian Andersen’s immortal story, “The Little Mermaid” (1837), with fiendish aplomb. Instead of seeking out the prince and willingly trading her voice for legs, Khaw’s mermaid becomes the prince’s prisoner and bride, her sisters slaughtered, her needle-like teeth extracted, her tongue cut out and fed to her. The story concludes as the mermaid gives birth to a litter of daughters, who set about devouring the prince and his kingdom.

As Salt begins, the mermaid, having lived on land too long to return to the sea, leaves her daughters feasting among the wreckage and the funeral pyres, and sets out across the snowy wilderness, accompanied by the plague doctor. Before long they stumble into a plot that draws from some of the Brothers Grimm’s gnarlier B-sides. Khaw name-checks two stories in particular, “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” (1812) and “The Three Army Surgeons” (1815). Khaw slices these folk tales apart and reassembles them into something even more sinister than the source material, involving a remote village populated almost entirely by children, a religious cult headed by three predatory surgeons obsessed with organ grafts and resurrection, and a ritual hunt in which humans are the sacrificial prey. Khaw credits their upbringing steeped in folklore and mythology for inspiration, though my mind went straight to the cannibalistic teens and wintry hellscape of Yellowjackets.

Khaw couches all their apocalyptic imagery and transformative gore in heightened language, keeping the violence at arm’s length, framing the mutilations in aesthetic terms. The phrase “self-enucleation” masks the horror of one character gouging out his own eyes, using “spoons of polished ivory” and “pearl-handled scissors” (p. 30). Thanks to ancestral memories of reincarnation and a bookishness borne of her captivity, the narrator is distanced enough from her own body that she can describe her own physical pain with great detachment:

 … I’d anticipated the memory of the fisherman’s knife, a tactile delirium inherited from past incarnations. Incisions made along the spine. The skin, drying to salt-crust, being peeled back after it’s first been loosened by a blade. The air blistering on bare muscle. An experience like drowning. (p. 70)

In the passage above, each individual pain is laid out like an organ on a tray, as if each occurs in isolation. The passive voice adds more distance (“Incisions made”; skin “being peeled back” after having “been loosened”). The feeling of drowning is given its own sentence fragment, as if the feeling of drowning happened to someone else, or to no one at all.

Khaw’s gilt-edged language becomes especially interesting when they use it to dissect the distancing effect of the language itself, like one of the surgery-addicted army doctors slicing off his own hand. Salt abounds with wry metacommentary about language, labels, stories, and control. Mermaids, Khaw tells us, are subject to misleading fairy tales, but they also experience rebirth and transformation, like fairy tales made flesh: “Like a story, we are a summation of our incarnations, a spirit refracted through a billion lives” (p. 23). In a nifty pair of sentences, Khaw connects ritual, storytelling, and the enforcement of binaries:

There is a reason the hunt is central to so many narratives.

For all that humanity professes to delighting in its own sophistication, it longs for simplicity, for when the world can be deboned into binaries: darkness and light, death and life, hunter and hunted. (p. 17)

Khaw highlights the artificiality of their own narrative by seeking out the most ornate and head-scratching words possible, words like “gorgeted,” “mordents,” “bolus,” “ixora,” “sapidity.” This calls to mind Kai Ashante Wilson combing the Oxford English Dictionary for “etymologies and tertiary meanings of obscure words.” But, while Wilson uses lofty language to talk about code switching and to create an immersive, godlike inner monologue, Khaw uses it to demonstrate how language can be a tool to deaden empathy, to control identity, and to render pain impersonal: “If only words weren’t meaningless,” one character jeers, before bisecting the face of an enemy (p. 67).

Here’s the neatest trick Khaw pulls off in the whole enterprise: Salt embodies the violence wrought by forcing a living being into the wrong category. In some fashion or other, every character has their body wrenched into a new and unwanted shape: not only our defanged, domesticated mermaid and our sewn-together doctor, but also the surgeons who are duped into grafting animal parts onto themselves, and the children who are forced to enact the role of the pig, speared to death, then held down, screaming, as new life is cut and stitched into them. It’s unclear for most of the story if, or how, any of the principal characters can be killed. But in Salt the stakes aren’t life and death, or at least they’re not life and death in the obvious way. The stakes have more to do with the possibility of escape from living death. At the risk of reading comforting binaries into Khaw’s story, it’s about endless physical violence versus sovereignty over one’s own body; forced metamorphosis versus willing transformation [2].

Willing transformation is where Salt’s love story comes in. In Andersen’s version, the mermaid submits to mutilation, voicelessness, and physical and emotional torment in hopes of marrying the prince and earning an immortal soul. She explores a wider world than anyone else in her family: riding, climbing mountains, standing in the sea at night in order to soothe the knifelike pain in her feet; gazing up at the stars or down at her old palace in the ocean depths. She fails to win the prince’s heart but, at the moment of her death, finds hope of salvation through an act of mercy. Khaw’s mermaid has thoughts about this, which she shares while relating her encounter with an itinerant storyteller who bears a strong resemblance to Andersen:

“Of all the men who have mistold my history, I resent him the least. Like me, he stood anchored in gilded chains, throat and wrists collared by another’s presumptions, breath beaten to gasps by a world that permits only a single direction: forward and away from our heart’s desire.

“He was not quite wrong, but he was certainly not right.” (pp. 25-26)

Khaw’s mermaids, unlike Andersen’s, have immortal souls, and are perpetually reborn and remade. In her explorations with the plague doctor, Khaw’s mermaid regrows her teeth and tongue by eating flesh. Nor do her transformations stop there. “ … I am not human, have never been human, shall never be human,” she insists, late in the story (p. 73). But this isn’t entirely true. Bound by deep romantic feelings for the plague doctor, who is stricken to near-death by a confrontation with the army surgeons and their cult, the mermaid ends up studying and laboring for four centuries in order to resurrect her beloved. The centuries change her, make her more human, this time of her own volition: “My eyes, once prismatic, are merely green now. My hair is ink, calligraphic in architecture but ultimately banal, bereft of the iridescence that once ran venous through each follicle” (p. 96). This is Khaw’s riposte to Anderson’s ending, in which the little mermaid becomes a spirit of the air and can ascend to heaven after three hundred years of good deeds. Instead of selflessness and salvation, Khaw’s mermaid wins another chance at life and love, and she and the doctor win, at long last, a chance to reshape their bodies as they see fit.

I wanted to like the love story more. It makes sense on paper. The plague doctor has shown the mermaid kindness during her captivity, has invited her to share her name and the stories of her lost home beneath the sea. The doctor and the mermaid have parallel histories of violent body modification and a shared appetite for revenge, as the mermaid learns when the doctor reveals their own origins at the hands of the army surgeons. There’s no obvious reason this pairing can’t work.

Falling in love is probably as subjective as reading, though, and that may be where I struggled to connect with the romance storyline. I have found that choosing to love someone, and to be loved by them, is itself a terrifying act of transformation [3]. I’ve had to assess my own emotional limitations and surpass them, to inventory my habitual acts of selfishness and guardedness and give many of them up. It wasn’t like dancing on knives or dissolving into sea foam, exactly, but it was the willing sacrifice of an old self in hopes of becoming a new one. It was a struggle, and it was scary. There was considerable conflict, internal and external.

Your mileage may vary, but this felt to me like the missing piece in Salt’s love story. We don’t see much of either character’s emotional makeup beyond their shared trauma. Our mermaid hated her captor-husband, but whether she has been in loving romantic relationships before, or had expectations about such relationships before captivity, or whether mermaids even have a concept of romantic love that human readers would recognize, is unclear. She leaves her newborn daughters in the ashes of the kingdom without attempting to interact with them, and she sheds no tears for the human child they’re devouring on the first page. Whether this lack of sentiment is normal for mermaids, or numbness that arose during her confinement, or both, is similarly uncertain.

The plague doctor is a closed book as well. We get few clues about their romantic history or expectations, and they have a highly selective relationship with morality. The doctor does not appear disturbed by the violent death of an entire kingdom. Throughout the carnage of the novella’s opening section, the doctor laughs frequently and holds the mermaid blameless. Their sense of righteous anger does emerge later in the story, because the hunted children are subjected to the same tortures that the doctor themself has weathered. Again, it’s unclear how the doctor’s moral compass, and by extension their relationship with medicine, functions in situations that don’t evoke their formative trauma. So when the mermaid and the doctor fall into easy companionship early in the story—and intense, self-sacrificing love by the story’s end—it’s hard to assess what internal obstacles, if any, they had to work through in order to be together. It's hard to say who they had to become as they fell in love, because we’re denied a fuller picture of who they were to begin with. Because of this, as rich as Salt is in theme and language, it feels incomplete.

Khaw has fished the dark waters of the myth pool before [4], and if there’s any justice they’ll fish them again many times. Maybe future, fully realized incarnations of this deathless story await, or other excursions into the same blasted fairy-tale landscape. I’ll be waiting, with great hunger, to see what new emotions and ideas Khaw trawls from the depths.

Endnotes

[1] It’s included as a bonus chapter at the end of the novella, though you may wish to read it first. It’s also included in Breakable Things, the story collection that won Khaw the Bram Stoker Award this past June. [return]

[2] The first thing this theme evoked, for me, was the ongoing effort by the worst people in the United States to legislate and threaten trans people out of existence. Of course, that’s hardly the only parallel that might occur to an American reader, especially since I’m writing this review during the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s abhorrent Dobbs decision. [return]

[3] Andersen, perpetually unlucky in love, suggests that weathering disappointment with a brave face and selfless deeds, as his mermaid does, is the key to spiritual transformation. [return]

[4] In addition to continuing where “Daughters” left off, Salt briefly references the Witch Bride from Khaw’s wonderfully wicked 2017 story “These Deathless Bones”. There may be other references I didn’t catch. [return]