The Great Work

“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 LoveAn 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...