Review of The Salt Grows Heavy

🪐✨ 07 Decemboriel 2024 🌓🦣 Day 10,402 ⛩️

baroque yet spare, clinical in its violence, the desperate brutality of Khaw's prose leaves me thirsty for more without feeling unfinished; on the contrary, I'm left feeling charmed by that special combination of self-completion and open-endedness which keeps one up late mulling over the details of ghost stories long after the campfire's ashes have gone cold. in four brief chapters Khaw sketches just enough of a queer, cruel fairytale landscape for the reader to intuit horizons beyond its horizons and depths beyond the depths, only to send the whole thing up in an ambiguous inferno which leaves me blinking hard at the afterglow and struggling to make out just what it is I've read. fans of the mytho-banal-horrific trifecta in Ken Liu's "Good Hunting" and Madeline Miller's Circe will notice resonances, amplifications and elaborations on certain themes and motifes. I look forward to watching where the literary subfield and Khaw herself go next in the wake of The Salt Grows Heavy.