HOW COULD I FORGET THE CANNIBALISM. banger

i do think this is one that i may revisit in the future. for my own writing reference LMAO

i think with a lot of novellas this couldve benefited from being longer because while i do rly like this, the pacing still feels incredibly fast, and a lot more plot details couldve been explored more. but oh well

the relationship between the mermaid and the plague doctor honestly came as a bit of a surprise, but it was a bit touching to read as well? idk i do think it felt a bit ham-fisted, but those latter paragraphs about death were gorgeous so consider this forgiven lol

i think another downside of this is. im not quite sure what khaw wanted to achieve by leading the mermaid and the plague doctor to the village in the middle of the taiga, but on the other hand it was interesting to witness a little peek into the plague doctor's origins

the mermaid and the plague doctor make an interesting pair because, as khaw later on presents through the mermaid's internal narration, they represent two stark dichotomies: one is a voracious carnivore and the other a sketchy surgeon of sketchy origins

and now they're travel partners!

onto the story itself, im an unfortunately always down for fucked up fairytale retellings -- this one features a mermaid that loosely followed the disney version of the little mermaid but of course it's a lot Worse than that

one downside of this is how. verbose it could get? and how it sometimes got in the way of actually delivering the story? i liked it a lot and i liked looking up the definitions of words and parsing through the sentences slowly but it may not be for everyone

very normie example of me but i remember ocean vuong's remarks on creating effective metaphors and khaw's writing in this absolutely nailed both the sensory and logical factor in all of them

dawg where do i start lmfao i think the first thing i can point out is the prose is crazy, i highlighted so many words because they were new to my vocab

the author is so so masterful in stringing sentences together, the way they create figures of speech scratches an itch in my brain