The Great Work

Summary

An alchemist and his teenage nephew hunt down a legend in this profound and unsettling speculative Western, for fans of Karen Russell and Victor LaValle.

Alone in a frontier town in the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest, Gentle Montgomery is grieving his best friend. Liam was an alchemist, killed when he tried to capture a creature that shouldn’t exist: a giant salamander that drives men mad. When Gentle’s nephew, Kitt, arrives at his doorstep, the two set out together to track the monster down so they can use its blood in an alchemical formula that will bring Liam back to life.

It’s a hard and haunted journey. The salamander produces surreal nightmares and waking dreams of a blighted, burning future. Gentle and Kitt soon find themselves pursued by a bloodthirsty hunter, a sadistic judge, and a doomsday cult, all of whom have their own plans for the river monster. Armed with nothing but Liam’s alchemical notebooks, they must not only find the salamander but learn to understand it—and the terrifying visions it causes—before it’s too late. As Gentle struggles to comprehend this harrowing experience, it becomes clear that the Great Work of the alchemists may pale in comparison to the small work of human connection.

Sheldon Costa’s dark, vivid, and strangely hopeful debut novel is a supernatural adventure through the wilderness of friendship and the rotten heart of the early American empire.