🟥 The Salt Grows Heavy (2023) Review - Thesaurus: A Horror Story | Book Waffle

The Salt Grows Heavy (2023) written by Cassandra Khaw

So. A mermaid protagonist and her witch doctor companion explore a dead world in this spooky novella. Sounds like a sick premise, doesn't it? And that book cover? Straight badass.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be a big flop.

Khaw is perhaps most famous for an earlier work, Nothing But Blackened Teeth. Back in 2023, I remember seeing that book cover in Libby and being thinking, "Hey! That looks interesting!" 

I checked it out from my library. As I was prepping to read it, I mentioned it to a work buddy. She's a real big horror lover. Even more so than I am. She told me she'd read it previously and "had thoughts." Ominous.

You know what happened when I pressed her for more? She laughed and walked away.

Ouch. Ain't that a damning endorsement?

The Goodreads for Nothing But Blackened Teeth seems to reflect that sentiment. Not that I'm saying Goodreads is the end-all be-all. I've read many books that were rated greater than 4/5 stars on Goodreads but were trash tier when I got to reading them. Nothing But Blackened Teeth sits at under 3/5. 

A consensus that bad usually means something has gone awry. Especially in this age of toxic positivity where people are reluctant to call out bullshit when they see it.

That was a long diatribe about a previous work, but what about this one? You know, the one that is actually in the title of this post? The Salt Grows Heavy certainly is doing better on Goodreads with its ~3.5/5 rating, so it's gotta be at least decent, right?

Well. No.

The Salt Grows Heavy is distinctly amateur.

The writing is pretty bad. Way too much exposition dumping. Every sentence feels like it was pawed over with a thesaurus. The text is always filtered through this artificial, pretentious lens. The protagonist describes everything in painstaking detail. Yet, somehow, the characters remain thin and uninspired.

Just so wordy and so. Dang. Slow. Our two main characters are passive AF.

I'll give some points for an interesting setting. It's described horribly, but it is unique. A fallen kingdom. Something like your Dark Souls or Elden Ring, I'm imagining. It creates a unique mood that counts for something. Not much. But something.

It's gory too. I can't fault Khaw's eagerness to play with her character's viscera, that's for sure. We've got monsters stitched together from all sorts of scavenged parts, and we're performing vivisections like an eager Japanese scientist in Manchukuo.

Maybe, dear reader, that's your thing. Maybe it ain't. It's not inherently a positive or a negative for me. I will criticize the book for cranking the gross-out knob up to 11 and keeping it there, though. It makes things feel stale. 

To be honest, this seems like an online creepypasta that someone published. The edginess certainly fits. The bizarre pacing which hampers story development is there too. That's something that I affectionately call "FanFictionitis," and this story has an awful lot of it.

Books like these seem to be the M.O. for this author. Whip up an interesting premise with a sexy cover and run with it. Sure the story is kinda ass, and the characters are boring. Doesn't matter. We're gonna market that shit to death anyway.

Scratch my previous statement. It doesn't read like a creepypasta. It reads like a book TikTok wrote. Interesting at a glance, but incredibly shallow once you scratch the surface.

🟥 Rating: 3/10