Courtesy notice to readers: Anbara Salam’s 2025 The Salvage is a haunted novel. Read with care. All playful warnings aside, I hope you’re into slow, creeping dread, because this book is absolutely dripping with it.
Set in the early 1960s, on the isolated, insular Scottish island of Cairnroch, The Salvage immediately plunges readers into the icy, freezing waters of protagonist Marta’s shipwreck dive, with an introduction to her shipwreck life following shortly after. She’s haunted by a guilt the readers discover, page by page, and when she sees a shadowy, crouching figure among the wreckage, one has to wonder: did she truly see a body down in the depths of the ship, or is she only manifesting her suffering?
Strange and unsettling events continue, and a deep winter freeze envelops the island, trapping Marta there. She falls for a woman who helps her navigate the difficult diving job that was supposed to be her big break, and they find solace in each other as staying on Cairnroch becomes increasingly more dangerous.
The Salvage courts our deepest fears with an everpresent, hovering menace. Creeping dread infiltrated me, the way the stabbing cold infiltrated every part of the novel. The novel doesn’t make the mistake of explaining too much. It offers a rational explanation and a supernatural one, balancing on the knife’s edge between the two. It holds both, sending the reader (this reader) ricocheting back and forth between relief and fearful uncertainty.
The outsider subplot threaded itself through the narrative with ease, subtly increasing the sense of disquiet. Marta struggles while on the zealous island. There’s a terrifying faith present, the kind that spits in your eye while preaching salvation. She’s an outsider to that faith and to the island, exacerbated by her status as a Syrian woman diver.
The ending had me in awe. It was so perfectly Marta. It takes true mastery to write an ending so appropriate, a clear bell tolling so hard that I’m still ringing. No notes. It hammer smashed me right between the eyes and I can’t stop thinking about it, what it means: the choices we make and the consequences we accept.
I did sometimes want to shake Marta out of her casual and all-encompassing self flagellation, but maybe that’s the point? Other than that, my one critique is that the length could have been reduced without losing impact, and that sometimes when the characters moved, they sprang out of a startling stillness, rushing into changes headlong. Feel free to take that opinion with a grain of salt, though, because it’s coming from a novella girlie.
While I’ll be the first to declare the impossibility of ever approaching the feeling I had the first time I read Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves—I was eighteen: fresher, more susceptible to terror; it took me years to stop sleeping with the lights on—and yet, The Salvage had that familiar panic settling in my chest and clawing its way up my throat.
As a testament to the crushing grip of this novel, I returned it via Libby without being entirely conscious of what I was doing, an instinct to rid myself of something sinister and otherworldly. It was only afterwards when I broke my trance that I realized having the book to refer to might be helpful in writing this review. Alas.
Overall, The Salvage is a strange, brilliant work by a powerful voice. Saturated with desperation and desire, this atmospheric novel demands to be experienced. If you like uneasy horror and being left with more questions than answers, this is likely your vibe.
Susanne Salehi, MA, MFA (she/they) is an Iranian American author and editor who writes queer heroes. They are a 2025-2026 Poetry Coalition fellow and a 2025 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices fellow. Her work appears in Fruitslice, Frazzled Lit, and the anthology By Her Sword. More at www.susannesalehi.com.
TAGS: Anbara Salam, horror, bisexual, winter, Scotland, Syrian representation, diver, shipwreck, Susanne Salehi
Warnings: homophobia, racism, religion
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