So it evoked both the type of laugh that is not melodious and not really a laugh, and the association with death (turned out his brother was the first one to die of that plague).

Nice. It is probably pretentious to point to my own reviews, but it was really neat to see the Lovecraft Reread point out how sea-soaked the language of "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" is, because that is the kind of thing that matters to me in the texture of my own writing. Similes and other figurative language bring in all the echoes it would be clunky to drop directly into the text. I don't want to make it sound too clinical, because often for me it isn't, it's just what feels right, but without that dimension I know my prose feels thin to me, and it's something I like to see in the writing of others as well.