The Great Work

by Sheldon Costa

Genres: Fantasy; Dark Fantasy; Occult & Supernatural; Horror

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.

Release date: November 4, 2025

Publisher: Quirk Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

Prologue

The first sighting of the Dragon of Dalton Lake occurred in May, five months before Washington officially joined the union. Joe Fisher, a Klallam man who lived alone in a shack on the northern shore of the lake, stumbled into the Wolf’s Den saloon one night and began screaming about the creature he’d just seen. Though Joe was generally a reserved man, visiting town once or twice a month to quietly sip whiskey in a corner of the bar, that night he couldn’t stop talking about the giant lizard, some monster with skin as white as the moon that had risen from the waters beneath his boat and nearly capsized him while he was out trying to catch trout.

The creature had only shown itself briefly, Joe said, surging up from the depths and disappearing a few seconds later. For a moment, the old man thought it might be a log that had dislodged itself from the lake sediment, but the beast lingered long enough for Joe to make out four fat arms with giant, webbed fingers, and a wide, triangular head. The monster studied him with dark, marble eyes, as if trying to parse out whether the fisherman was friend or foe, before it dipped back beneath the waves.

Few believed Joe’s story. He was ancient, and by all accounts had spent the bulk of his life as a recluse. And anyway stories of giant monsters were as common on the peninsula as sawdust. Most figured Joe would move on from his tale in a day or two, maybe exhume it every few years when the man felt like spooking some newcomer at the bar. But Joe didn’t move on. He returned to the Wolf’s Den every night for the next week, looking worse and worse every time he stepped through the door. His eyes sank to two dead embers hidden in the leathery folds of his face. He twitched and shivered in his seat, slapping at the air around him like he was being pinched by phantoms. If he talked at all, he spoke only of the dragon. How it came to him in dreams. Showed him things. If anyone bothered to ask him what these things might be, he only gnashed his teeth and whimpered, as if the very act of speaking of what he’d seen was too painful. The townsfolk began to give him a wider berth.

Two weeks after Joe’s encounter with the dragon, he stopped coming to town. At night, no light emanated from his little cabin across the lake. When the sheriff, Mac Dalton, went to investigate, he found the old man hanging from the branches of a dead tree in his front yard. At his feet, he’d left a sheet of paper neatly folded beneath a rock. Two words were scrawled on the page in letters that had been retraced again and again, as if Joe was afraid they might be missed: DEEP WATERS.

Soon other people began reporting their own sightings of the dragon. A colossal white body crushing through the trees behind their homes. The flash of a giant tail disappearing beneath the lake’s water. A low, throbbing roar that shook the trees in the middle of the night. With these encounters came more nightmares, more desperate townsfolk gathered in the Wolf’s Den, their faces winnowed down to the same expressions of exhausted hopelessness that had haunted Joe’s features in his final days.

A few followed his lead and took their own lives. They hung themselves and shot themselves and hurled their bodies off the nearby cliffs. Some left town, loading up whatever belongings would fit on their old carts and leaving the rest behind. Some simply disappeared.

Those who didn’t see the creature weren’t safe from its influence, either. The water from their wells took on a strange taste, a blend of coal oil and copper that refused to dislodge itself from their throats. Livestock that were once plump and docile became ornery, refusing hay and slop even as their ribs pressed up through their skin. Crops that had stood tall and healthy drooped and rotted on their stalks. When rumors reached Dalton Lake about strange occurrences along the coast, where the turbid waves kept belching up horrible fish with blind eyes and human teeth, the news was almost banal.

By the time the sheriff realized Dalton Lake was headed toward a crisis, it was already too late. He dubbed the phenomenon “lizard fever” and forbade all mention of the monster. Yet the town had become obsessed with the creature and what its presence might mean. The most devout among them proclaimed that the monster was a sign of the end times, a beast straight from the pages of Revelation. The local priest, finding his pews increasingly packed on Sunday, did little to dissuade them. He was the one who’d dubbed it a dragon in the first place: one of hell’s scaley minions, come to test their faith there at the edge of the civilized world.

As for those who thought themselves immune to apocalyptic theatrics of this sort—those who’d seen, over the years, how every drought and famine and flu became evidence that the end times were at hand—even they could not deny that Armageddon was in the air. If they saw no dragons in their dreams, old nightmares they’d thought long forgotten slipped back into their heads. And if they could not turn to prayer they turned, instead, to drink. They locked their doors, clutched their bottles, and waited for this new and terrible thing to pass.