Salt Slow, in its entirety, can be summed up as the body betraying the narrator. First the transformation in “Mantis,” then people’s Sleeps leaving their bodies in “The Great Awake,” and finally, in “The Collectibles,” a woman collects men’s body parts to supposedly build a better boy.
There are concepts in this story that we can all relate to. We’ve all had our bodies betray us at some point in our lives, whether that was losing sleep and suffering the side effects, or going through puberty. Each short story of Salt Slow has something for everyone. The stories aren’t horror, per say, though they can be considered that during a first read-through. They are more the expression of anxieties known to all, but especially to women. The narrators in these stories so far have been women, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. They all play into fears that almost every woman has had.
”The Collectibles,” on the other hand (and eventually “Stop Your Women’s Ears with Wax”), take on a more misogynistic fear. What if the women we mistreat rise against us? In “The Collectibles,” that is exactly what happens. After a bad break up, Jenny begins to collect the body parts of different men and lay them out in the basement. We can assume she’s assembling her own man, but that’s never clarified. Either way, Jenny is living out a great fear of men; that fear of witchcraft (or women coming together I treated her badly, what is she going to do to me? Well apparently, she’s going to gather arbitrary body parts from different men and begin putting them together. It sounds like horror, but that’s because it’s shining light onto something we all already feared.
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I agree that all the themes in these stories are relatable, particularly given that the narrators are female. Jenny’s situation can be perceived as rising against the stereotype that women are easily seduced back to her ex male partner. However, Jenny craves something that can’t be attained: someone perfect.