I’ve taken a long time to parse out my thoughts on this book because there is so much to chew on. The Salt King weaves themes of grooming, power dynamics, faith, genocide, hope, and romance together in a way that somehow doesn’t feel clustered. Pulley takes every single page to slowly lay the groundwork for all of these messages while letting the tension of the horror build. It ends in a stunning climax that ups the scale of what the characters are dealing with to the nth degree without veering into cartoonish territory. This is all without mentioning the stunning romance between Jericho and Avelyn which had me kicking my feet and giggling one moment and crying the next!!

The footnotes are perhaps an acquired taste but as someone who has never been religious and therefore walked in without context for a lot of what was going on, I found them both useful and hilarious!! They added key details to the dynamics in the book discreetly while cutting the tension at the appropriate moments. However, they do somewhat disappear in the last third or so of the book which was a bit disappointing.

I will say, there are some pacing issues in this that are hard to ignore. The story certainly drags a bit in the beginning, with multiple perspective chapters that we never return to for no apparent reason. This comes together in the climax but I’m not sure it was worth scattering the introduction of the book the way Pulley did. I personally didn’t mind it because of how much I was enjoying the character work, but this also means that I was disappointed to find that several of the perspective characters introduced in the beginning weren’t coming back.

Furthermore, the ending is very rushed. This seems to have been in the name of a happy ending instead of a doomsday scenario, but the way things were going I had already made my peace with the bad ending and found the actual resolution to be a bit of a cop out. I think there are books out there that are better for their abrupt endings but, this is story is truly a slow and therefore doesn’t fit that type of conclusion whatsoever.

I’ve also seen criticism about Avelyn’s character arc and his conflicting political views at the beginning of the story; while I completely respect how off putting this can be (being nonbinary myself), I personally was able to enjoy the arc he had and didn’t feel as though it was too subtle. However, this may come from the fact that I much prefer character arcs that require the reader to do thoroughly analyze them in order to understand their journey.

In fact, that understated quality of the book is what I enjoyed the most!! As I mentioned before, this book is juggling a lot at once and the only reason it doesn’t feel like a cluster fuck of analogies and metaphors is because of Pulley’s subtlety. I had a blast dissecting the different dynamics, themes, and plots in this book but that type of reading experience really isn’t for everybody. To a different reader, I fully understand how this work can come off as shallow but after reading scores of books that all but write out their message in bold text, The Salt King was incredibly refreshing.

Overall, I understand that this work is very hit or miss but for me it was a hit!! If you’ve been searching for good queer religious horror and can handle the slow pace I certainly recommend!! However, if you get through the first few chapters and aren’t gelling with it go ahead and skip this one as the tone and writing style don’t change.

Audiobook review: I personally loved the audiobook!!! However, I think that comes from tandem reading this book right off the bat. The support of the narrator helped me get through the slog of information in the beginning without getting confused, and is probably a big reason why I liked the footnotes so much. If you’re looking into this book, I highly recommend tandem reading it with the audiobook but if you’ve already read the book without it, kept it that way. There’s no way the narrator is going to sound like what you had in your head, especially because he doesn’t try to create a specific Hreod accent.