The Mermaid & The Plague Doctor

New-to-me author Cassandra Khaw's novella, 'The Salt Grows Heavy' (May 2023) is such a delightful read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The myths, the supernatural entities and evil humans. The language is succinct, yet ancient. 

I like how the author uses the vocabulary freely in the genre of horror and dark fantasy, you know, such as penumbra, taiga and bezoar. Ahhhh... this is how fairy tales should be. (Reviews here, here, here and here.)

I loved how gory the opening chapter is. We dive straight into the gory details. We see the aftermath of the revenge massacre of a kingdom and its city/villages by a mermaid's hungry newborn but grown daughters who are feral af. I have no idea how many she spawned. The mermaid was imprisoned by the prince of the kingdom who killed her sisters. She was tortured, had her teeth knocked out, magic stolen, impregnated and had her tongue cut out, braised in spices and fed back to her in slivers.

Two of my daughters look back, eyes shining. They are seated astride a twitching form, its limbs too small to have belonged to an adult. Like cats, they croon to one another even as they nibble their fins and fingertips clean. My breath snags. Only days old but already, they are the best of their parents. They have their father's full lips, his blue eyes, his supple sun-warmed skin.

And they have my teeth, my deepwater hair, like the lures of the anglerfish spun into thick coils. Nothing sticks to those radiant strands, no amount of gore or mud. Which is fortunate, given how messily my offspring eat. 

After the massacre, the mermaid leaves the kingdom to return to the ocean. She travels with the non-binary plague doctor who offers to guide her home. She wants to return to the ocean. That would take three nights of traveling, and they would experience more human horrors along the way. That gives her the 'Three Nights' as the three chapters in this novella. 

Along the way, the mermaid teams up with the plague doctor to save a village of children who are the subjects of an experiment by three 'surgeons' who are called 'saints'. The plague doctor is a pre-eternal human who was imprisoned as a child by three 'surgeons', experimented on, had organs removed and replaced, and stitched together all new as a being who lives pre-eternal. 

The plague doctor pivots, raises themself slightly on the arch of a heel as they lean in, their voice warm against the skin of my ear. There is a grin in their next words, a texturing of teeth bared, feral. "How do you kill any religion? You convince its flock that their shepherds are wolves."

"And how do you plan to do that?"

"We find a Judas goat."

The mermaid eats meat, human. She doesn't hesitate to devour her enemies either. Of course she is able to regenerate even after being eviscerated. Story has it that the three surgeons caught her and the plague doctor and tortured them and wanted to burn them alive. She lost the plague doctor because he succumbed to his injuries. She then burns the evil children and surgeons alive. She was pained at losing the plague doctor but she found his undamaged and intact bezoar within the ashes. 

The story doesn't end like that. I think most readers are like me — we don't want a fantasy tale to end like this. It isn't done! I read on. There is an Epilogue. And then there's this afterword that should have been the Prologue. At the end, we know what happened before, and how it ends. The Epilogue nicely concludes the story. I LOVE IT.