I was going to give this a long review but like... I just can't care anymore.

Good if you're looking for a very well written, beautifully constructed, minutely researched bury your gays. Yeah, I'm miffed. Fuck this book. It had everything going for it to be my favorite book of the year, and having a completely unnecessary and shoddy relationship split after spending 500 pages with a couple is............ disappointing.

Gay lit deserves better. Still a fucking amazing book, but we deserve better. ( )

Excellent character study of a morally disturbed man. Being in Jacob’s mind was a fascinating experience, if not exactly a pleasant one (because of his religious guilt). He was a very peculiar MC, ‘savage’ in both anger and love, impulsive and prone to obsession. I’m still not sure if he suffered from a mental disorder or if his ‘Voice’ was just the manifestation of his fear and shame… Definitely not a ‘good’ man, however you look at it, but his story still broke my heart.

The writing here was just stunning, very descriptive, and even if it was a little overlong in places after the 50% mark (mostly the colony-related bits), I skipped nothing. I give credit where credit’s due, and this debut deserves the highest rating. ( )

Dropped at 76 pages. This no doubt an excellent book but just not for me. I had a hard time with the archaic language (it reads very historically accurate and just didn't process well in my head) and thus difficulty following the narrative. If it was maybe 200 pages not 500 I'd have stuck with it but that's too much for this humble reader.

Although this book had been in my radar for years, I was quite surprised by it. I expected many things from this story: the gruesome war scenes, the love story, the erotic tension, the tragic background of England during a horrible historical moment. But I did not expect a story build around a sociopath main character.

Of course I have read books with dislikable characters, but Jacob Cullen, our narrator, crosses this line. His reasoning for violence and his lack of empathy for those that he terribly hurts seem as a symptom of something darker than simply someone responding violently to the violence around himself. One finishes this book not only sorry for those that he hurt, but afraid for those yet to cross his path in the future.

One of his biggest victim is of course the man he believes to love. Jacob's obsession and jealousy will eventually lead to his lover's ruin But Christopher Ferrier was also a victim of his own idealism, a man born ahead of his time.

I am not giving it a higher rating because I felt that the story dragged a bit too long, with too many unnecessary passages. This book could easily been 100 pages shorter. I started it with a lot of gusto, but halfway through it began to tire me. Too much canary wine was served and salted cabbage eaten. But Maria McCann has me wondering about her other books. ( )

I read Maria McCann’s novel The Wilding several years ago, in just a couple of sittings (most of it was read on a flight to Italy so I had little else to distract me). I had quite enjoyed that book so expected much of the same of As Meat Loves Salt, which was McCann’s debut novel. However, apart from the genre of historical fiction, there was little similar about these books. I far preferred As Meat Loves Salt, which is easily the darker of the two novels.

Set in the early years of the English Civil War, the anti-hero and narrator is Jacob Cullen, a man who is in domestic service with his two brothers, although they were originally born into wealth. Having committed murder (don’t worry, this is revealed in the first few pages and is not a spoiler), Jacob flees with his new wife and one of his brothers, but when things go wrong he finds himself joining the New Model Army fighting in the ongoing war, and befriending the enigmatic fellow soldier Christopher Ferris.

After they leave the New Model Army, Ferris returns to his home in London and offers Jacob a home there. For fear of spoiling the story for anyone who wants to read this book, I’ll not reveal more, except to say that things get very dark very quickly. Emotions run extremely high and Jacob in particular has little success in controlling his feelings. To say he is quick to anger is an understatement. He is a large, strong man, capable of committing much physical harm, and almost a slave to his own violent tendencies. He always acts without thinking and no matter how much he regrets his outbursts later, he is seeming unable to control his rage when it bubbles up inside him.

For all that he is a man who one would wish to avoid, he’s not the only one in this book. Ferris is charming and well meaning, but mercurial and manipulative. I actually cared for him very little, but the relationship between him and Jacob was a fascinating one. (It has just occurred to me that the women in this book come across by and large far better than the men.)

The one thing I would have liked to have known more about was the fate of Zeb – without giving anything away, I did think he would feature more than he did, and that there was an interesting story. If Maria McCann ever feels like writing the story from his point of view, I would definitely be interested in reading it.

Overall I would definitely recommend this book. It’s not an easy read, and there are a few very violent scenes. But it’s well written with a not very likeable but always interesting narrator – if this is the kind of book that appeals to you, I would give this one a try. ( )