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Book: “Our Cut of Salt” by Deena Helm
Publishing Info: Tor Nightfire, September 2026
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: There is something haunting Nuhad’s childhood home in Haifa. Cats avoid its perimeter, strange noises come from within, and residents have mysteriously vanished without a trace. Although Nuhad has not returned to her home since the Nakba in 1948, she always held a place for the house in her heart.
And, in return, the house did the same for her.
After Nuhad passes away, her granddaughter, Marina, is determined to visit her grandmother’s home after a lifetime of being kept in the dark about her culture and family history. Marina’s mother, Haifa – named for the city that was lost to their family – reluctantly agrees to her trip, though she knows firsthand that some secrets are better left buried.
But the house is no longer a home. It is a painful, festering wound that infects everything it touches. The more Marina digs into her family’s past, the sicker she becomes. Despite Nuhad’s ghostly warnings, Haifa rushes to help her daughter.
As the three women converge in their ancestral home, they must put the haunting to rest before the secrets of the past drown them all.
Review: Thank you to Tor Nightfire for sending me an eARC of this novel via NetGalley!
I always find it funny when people have a knee jerk reaction to horror as a genre that is only there to upset and terrify people in a bad way. I grew up in a household where I was the only horror fan, and I definitely had comments from my parents about why I wanted to watch or read this kind of stuff that is so upsetting and, at times, tasteless (my poor mother, having to go up to the Blockbuster counter to rent YET ANOTHER slasher movie gore fest for her teenage Goth daughter). But I find horror to be a genre that has a capacity for so much empathy and connection, and whenever I read a book like “Our Cut of Salt” by Deena Helm I think of the way the genre can be written off when it can have SO MUCH TO SAY.
This is a haunted house story, but it is moreso a family saga involving three generations of Palestinian women who have dealt with immense trauma and grief, starting with the Nakba in 1948 and up to 2002 (the time this book is set). Marina feels disconnected from her Palestinian heritage, living in Chicago with her mother Haifa and wanting to understand her history, and decides to return to the family home in Haifa (it can be hard to keep track with a place and a character sharing a name, just be warned), which has been long lost to the family after her grandmother Nuhad and her family were driven out by Israeli occupation. Haifa doesn’t want Marina to go back, but she does, and discovers a brutal past and a house that seems to be alive, enraged, and hungry. We have multiple perspectives, jumping from Nuhad’s time during the Nakba, to Haifa’s strained relationship with her traumatized mother, to Marina’s return to a homeland that is now overtaken with hostile colonial violence targeted at her people. The historical and social aspects of this book are brutal and incredibly emotional, and while it is set almost twenty five years ago it is a really stark reminder that this violence in Palestine didn’t begin three years ago, and that the occupation has a long and terrible history. It’s a very difficult read at times, but it’s also an important one, and it is once again a horror story that taps into very real horrors and brings out despair and empathy on a deep and visceral level.
In terms of the haunted house bits, I think what I found most creative about this book was that not only do we see perspectives of our three generations of women, but also from the house itself. The house is angry and hungry, feeding upon settlers who attempt to make claim, and waits for its rightful owners to return, unwilling to allow anyone else inside for long. I liked having the house’s perspective a lot, as that is what kept the straight up paranormal horror afloat in a book that could have been enveloped fully by a family saga and real life horrors. This horror choice really worked for me. And the real life horrors, as mentioned above, really make this book the horrifying story that it sets out to be, and Helm doesn’t hold back. Be warned, this doesn’t take place during the current violence, but it goes to show that it has been happening a VERY long time.
I will say that I did have one criticism of this book, and it’s a criticism that I always need to address whenever it comes up in anything I’m reading, and that is the idea of relying too much of telling versus showing. This book has a very passionate and emotionally charged core (understandably so), and in a horror novel that has a lot of metaphors that it wants to convey, there is a trap that can be fallen into of over-explaining the metaphors and broader messages. This book has a lot of that, with a lot of repeated emphasis on what the reader is supposed to be getting from the metaphors or symbolism at hand, and any time we got an over-explanation it really stood out. The messages are important and I don’t even disagree with them and I understand what is being said, but it felt like there wasn’t enough trust in the reader to understand when I think that the messages and themes were powerful enough to stand on their own two feet, as it were.
But outside of that last criticism, I found “Our Cut of Salt” to be deeply emotional and very timely, a family saga with some real and metaphorical hauntings. Recommended for sure.
Rating 8: Timely, haunting, and filled to the brim with grief, “Our Cut of Salt” is about occupation, family, displacement, and home.
Reader’s Advisory
“Our Cut of Salt” is included on the Goodreads lists “2026 Gothic”, and “SWANA Fiction Books – 2026”.
