The Great Work
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- 85,00 kr
Publisher Description
“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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Debut novelist Costa sets this astounding tale of alchemy, prophecy, and adventure in Washington's Olympic Peninsula in 1889. Gentle Montgomery and his mentor, Liam O'Kelly, make their living as embalmers while Liam endeavors to complete the Great Work of alchemy, "the conquest of death." When Liam drowns in Dalton Lake, the rumored home of a water-dwelling dragon, Gentle is determined to carry on Liam's work and certain that the dragon's own blood is the final ingredient necessary to resurrect his dead friend. His 14-year-old nephew, Kitt, arrives unexpectedly from Ohio, fleeing his abusive father, Gentle's brother, and insists on hunting the monster with Gentle. The pair embark on their quest with a goal but no determined path, plagued along the way by disturbing dreams and accompanied by their faithful mule, Abe, who carries Liam's embalmed body in a casket. What follows are a series of wonderfully strange episodes, reminiscent in timbre of The Odyssey or Huckleberry Finn. Colorful characters met as they track the monster through the Pacific Northwest include "unlikely hunter" Hercules Belmont and the Sons of Adam, a group who believe themselves to be the "Leviathan's chosen." This is a weird western done right: surprising, bizarre, occasionally grim, but ultimately life-affirming.
