Mother Salad

by Helena Pantsis

They say you can tell the gender of your unborn baby from the way your stomach sits, how your body changes, how big your nose grows. I found out I was carrying an adult woman when the interior decor of my uterus became comprised of orange linoleum tiling and ineffectual fans, velvet upholstered three-seaters and marble countertops.

Helena Pantsis’ surreal short story collection explores the plights of womanhood through the lens of mothers and the children of mothers. In 21 stories of the strange and the uncanny, Mother Salad unravels the image of the woman in shambles, identity fractured and exploring a world which has long abandoned the creature it so carefully constructed, betrayed by the very people she has been taught to trust.

‘Pantsis upends expectations on the narratives that society feeds us and how they manifest in our psyche over time. A searing and unique collection of startling originality.’ – Emily Tsokos Purtill

Genres: Short Stories

149 pages, Paperback

Published March 31, 2026

Reviews

[Marianne]

Mother Salad is a collection of twenty-one short stories by prize-winning Australian author, Helena Pantsis. The stories vary in length from barely a page to fifteen pages, and it’s a fairly mixed bag, so may appeal to a variety of readers. The author blurb states that Pantsis has a fond appreciation for the weird, the dark, and the experimental, and that is certainly borne out in this collection. Some are very good; some are too short and too vague to have much impact.

The best of the bunch, stories in which: A teen grows a boyfriend in the manner of mail-order sea monkeys; a garage-sale tapestry, the repair of which is so fascinating, it completely (and literally) absorbs a mother of two; a phone conversation that includes sea monkeys and transplant organs, with an “oops” ending.

Also good are: a red thread, emerging from a mouth, ultimately proves to be the solution to insomnia for a lonely woman; a single mother’s decision to keep her daughter at her favourite age backfires; a girl goes fishing with her brother and grandpa, and they hook something very strange; and, her body twisted and contorted, after five decades, a reclusive woman tries to reverse the damage before her daughter comes to visit, unwittingly revealing her true nature.

Then there are: a post-apocalyptic story with radioactive zombies and a grieving mother; the death of a spider is the final straw that leads to a family estrangement, but might spiders be a comfort in the loneliness that follows?

There are pieces about: an infatuation with a new and different student at school; a disturbing story about a worm inexplicably allowed by a baby’s mother to enter his ear; instructions a la basic computer commands that may describe the aftermath of patricide; a bizarre little glimpse into the lives of a husband with a much-too-talkative wife with a cow tongue; care instructions for your cryogenically frozen mother; a young woman whose drunken consumption of strange objects offers surprising results when she vomits them up; and a missing cat and a parasite in the brain.

For those with truly weird taste: a piece about a mother dying of cancer, father and daughters and talking walls; a woman pregnant with an adult woman foetus; a truly dark and surreal piece about a woman who eats bits of her baby; a mother’s love for, and father’s inability to accept a robot daughter; and something about tulips in the second person that reads like a stream of consciousness/fever dream.
This unbiased review is from an unsolicited copy provided by UWA Publishing.

[liv turko]

This was brilliant - as horrifying as it was hilarious. Pantsis explores the unsettling capacities of the female body, weaving tales in which their natural miracles are twisted into new forms of creation, mutation and adaptability. Bodies morph into swans, consume themselves from the inside out and become wearable skins for farm animals.

Mother Salad pushes the limits of bodily autonomy by ruminating on the uncomfortable question: how much are we really in control of our body? From the social and political powers which dominate from the outside, to within our own bodies which we are truly yet to understand, how much are we operating within the unknown, and which influence is more frightening? Just as one woman obsessively pulls an infinite cotton string from her body, another becomes trapped within the threads of a tapestry which dominates her caring attention.

In this exploration, Pantsis’ critically twists patriarchal concepts of motherhood, yet also confronts our own sanitised understanding of the female bodily capacity to create, consume and love. In an apocalyptic future, a mother cleans and embraces a dead zombified body of someone else’s daughter, while another innately cannibalises her own son to return her creation to its original source.

[tinkingaboutbooks]

Mother Salad is a brilliant, quirky collection of short stories that leans hard into the surreal and the somatic. There are zombie apocalypses, spider bait lotion, and enough visceral imagery, from fish eyes to vomiting up hearts, to make your stomach turn.

I think this will resonate with fans of Bora Chung, but maybe don't read it while you're eating breakfast!

Thank you so much to UWAP and the author for my ARC, I read it over a day!

[geogeo]

The prose wasn't to my taste, and I felt I needed a bit more from some of the stories, particularly Sea Monkeys Don't Die. Such a cool concept that felt underutilised. But it was a fun read nonetheless, and also, I have developed an irrational fear of someone spraying Mortein into my mouth.

[ariana]

eccentric and conceptually strong, but sometimes the stories were a bit too short or lacked emotion