Donald Maass Literary Agency

Tor.com: Brilliant wonderful amazing fantasy novel, and the second fantasy novel I have read this year (or ever) featuring UBI. The experience of reading The Saint of Bright Doors is a little like having a mild fever—it’s the atmosphere of the book and the way it makes you feel. Everything is slightly too big and too bright, and details keep piling up and slipping out of control, and it’s all stirred together with a dash of Kafka—but in a good way. This is a dense, powerful book with interesting metaphysics and worldbuilding, and very real characters. When I think about it I find myself slipping back into it.

There’s a lot here, and it’s coming from a lot of directions to flow together into a perfectly crafted whole. But when I think about trying to describe it—look, this book contains a support group for people who were almost Chosen Ones, and there are enough of them in the city to help each other recover. And the city—it’s complex and layered like a real place, and this isn’t our world but it has both email and magic. I recommend reading the first chapter, because if you like it, you’ll like all of it. Absolutely worth your time. I expect to see this on awards ballots next year. I very much look forward to reading it again now I know the shape of it and where it was going, because I really couldn’t tell. Stunning. I am still a little stunned by it myself.

Locus:  Stepping into The Salt Grows Heavy is like stepping into someone else’s fever dream. This strange, dark, violent, lyrical novella contains some of Khaw’s most brilliant, elegant, haunt­ing writing: ‘‘For all that humanity professes to delighting in its own sophistication, it longs for simplicity, for when the world can be deboned into binaries: darkness and light, death and life, hunter and hunted.’’ The use of language is im­maculate, but that doesn’t detract from the great pacing. The prose is lyrical and flows like water from a broken vase, but that doesn’t diminish the impact of the gore, murders, and scenes of surgery and self-mutilation. The taiga’s cold is brutal, and the small village is a bare-bones place where life seems to barely hold on, but the wealth of details Khaw injected into the narrative rivals that of any 400-page novel. In short, this is a novella that feels much larger than its word count and shows a very talented storyteller at the height of their powers.