Sheldon Costa w/ McKayla Coyle, THE GREAT WORK

Join Sheldon Costa for a discussion of his debut novel, The Great Work, a profound and unsettling speculative Western, in which an alchemist and his teenage nephew hunt down a legend, for fans of Karen Russell and Victor LaValle. He is joined by writer McKayla Coyle.

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.

Sheldon Costa is an award-winning fiction writer who has been published in the Georgia Review, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, and others. 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.

McKayla Coyle (they/them) is a lesbian writer from Alaska currently living in Washington and the author of Mothman Is My Boyfriend and the cozy lifestyle guide Goblin Mode. They’re the engagement editor for Literary Hub and they hold an MFA in fiction from the New School. In their free time they read fantasy novels and make a lot of jam.