A couple of years ago, the cover of Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing but Blackened Teeth drew me in and I had to have it in a clear case of judging a book by its cover. Although I liked that story of a haunted house (and a possession), in retrospect, its many parts almost overwhelmed the story that could be told in the confines of a novella. In Khaw’s second novella, The Salt Grows Heavy, the story seems perfectly suited for the vessel it is in—unlike, perhaps, the characters within it.
Our definitely-not-Disney mermaid narrator is nameless and, at first, wordless, too. In addition to her charming king of a husband pulling out all of her sharp mermaid teeth and killing (and mounting) her sisters, he had cut out her tongue. There’s no bringing her sisters back, but she gets her revenge. More accurately, her half-mermaid children, born ravenous, have gotten revenge for her, and now she walks through the wilderness in the burning aftermath of that revenge.
Joining her is a plague doctor, one of the few people who had thought of her as a person in her time in the palace. As they navigate the snow-covered land, they come across a group of children chasing and killing another kid. When the kids reveal that the murdered boy can come back to life with the help of three surgeons, for whom life and death are matters of opinion, the plague doctor’s mysterious past comes into very sharp focus. The mermaid isn’t the only one in need of a little revenge, and there’s more than one kingdom in need of being burned down.
Although this is a gory story of revenge, just beneath is a story of friendship, and maybe love (though do those always have to be different things?), between two people who have been called monsters—and who have been changed literally and metaphorically into new things because of the monstrosity of those around them. The mermaid knows she can’t return to the sea she longs for, while the plague doctor was never quite their own person to begin with and can’t remember who they might have been if left unscathed. Trauma binds these two, but it also allows one to understand the other in ways an ordinary person simply could not.
It is, of course, still a gory story of revenge, emphasis on the gore. Our mermaid regenerates her strength, and various parts whittled away by the prince and others, through eating flesh, and there’s plenty she needs to regenerate. The killing of the boy is only the beginning for a series of violences that might be even more nightmarish for how clinical the mermaid tells us of them. If jars of body parts on shelves isn’t your thing, this may be one to miss.
But if you can get through those scenes, there’s something tender waiting at the end. Khaw could have sent us into a tailspin of blood of gore, and it wouldn’t feel out of place. Instead, we get a far more gentle adieu to this kingdom of blood and ash. I don’t feel this is a spoiler, because up until the point that it unfolds, such a thing seems unthinkable, and it is the development of that unexpected gentle thing that brings the magic.
Ring Reads 