Cassandra Khaw - Blog Posts

THE SALT GROWS HEAVY by CASSANDRA KHAW (REVIEW)

quickly: an everlasting mermaid and her undead companion must defeat a village of evil children and the magicians that control them (why do immortals fall in love? / children of the corn / bad things come in threes / grotesquery and gore galore / men and their ignorance of anything not man / the hunt / taming by mutilation / winter ice on scaled skin / what’s in a heart? / unmasking the wizard / remembering forgotten powers / regenerating lost parts / the essence of a man is a ball of shit in his gut).

What a strange, romantic, bloodthirsty fantasy this was. A sea siren is siphoned from the sea by a Prince, stripped of her teeth, her voice, and forced to be a tradwife. Two daughters are born from this inhumane union of land and sea, and their mother watches expectantly as her daughters devour the Prince’s kingdom bite by bite. Walking over the piles of bodies her daughters have made in their hunger, she finds herself at the beginning of a spectacularly bloody journey where she will fully restore herself, including regrowing her teeth and regaining her voice.

A short read jam-packed with $50 baroque vocabulary words that make the short page count feel heavier than it actually is. In the future, I’d like to return to this book and read it very slowly.

★ ★ ★ / ★

comfy culty cozy library haul for fall:

THROUGH THE NIGHT LIKE A SNAKE (LATIN AMERICAN HORROR STORIES) by VARIOUS AUTHORS

A FEW RULES FOR PREDICTING THE FUTURE (ESSAY) by OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

PARABLE OF THE TALENTS by OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

THE GATHERING DARK (FOLK HORROR ANTHOLOGY) edited by TORI BOVALINO

THE SALT GROWS HEAVY by CASSANDRA KHAW

BLACK OBSERVATORY (POEMS) by CHRISTOPHER BREAN MURRAY

PARABLE OF THE SOWER (GRAPHIC NOVEL) by OCTAVIA E. BUTLER*

*read Parable of the Sower earlier this year, ★ ★ ★ ★ ★!! The story is even more poignant, now that her predictions have come true. Rereading this in graphic novel form before I move on to the sequel, Parable of the Talents!