The Great Work - by Sheldon Costa (Paperback)

About the Book

"In the post-Civil War Pacific Northwest, Gentle and his nephew hunt down a legendary giant salamander in an attempt to resurrect Gentle's best friend using alchemical knowledge"--

Book Synopsis

"Not to be missed."--Booklist

"A moody, atmospheric, and singular novel which navigates corners of American history through the complicated territory of horror, the monstrous, and the heroic."--Kelly Link, best-selling author of The Book of Love

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. And 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. And 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.

Review Quotes

One of Lit Hub's Top 15 Novels You Need to Read This Fall

"Costa's genre-defying debut novel is a philosophical page-turner about the end of the American frontier, the horrors of war, the greedy destruction of pristine wilderness, and the human connections that give hope and meaning to it all. Not to be missed."--Booklist

"A moody, atmospheric, and singular novel which navigates corners of American history through the complicated territory of horror, the monstrous, and the heroic."--Kelly Link, best-selling author of The Book of Love

"The Great Work is a vision of America as both homeland and horror story. And it is also just a good ol' page-turner, the kind of dark tale that delivers on every promise it makes."--Joseph Fink, cocreator of Welcome to Night Vale

"Costa's ripsnorting debut is a wild ride through freaky old America: Backwoods alchemists, a sadistic reverend judge, an animalist cult, and a quest for a primeval monster of nightmares come together in a hell-for-leather frontier yarn packed with action, wonder, and heart."--James Kennedy, author of Bride of the Tornado

About the Author

Sheldon Costa is an award-winning fiction writer who has been published in the Georgia Review, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, and other outlets. He holds an MFA from the Ohio State University and lives in rural Missouri with his wife and three cats. This is his debut novel.