TL;DR: A moody weird-western about grief, alchemy, and a monstrous white salamander stalking the Washington frontier. The creature feature bones are solid, the alchemical wrapper feels fresh, and while the mid-book trudge saps momentum, the atmosphere and odd tenderness make this a good pick for readers who like their horror mineral rich and a little mystical.

Set in the post-Civil War Pacific Northwest, this one pitches its tent right where frontier myth and occult obsession meet. Gentle Montgomery, an embalmer with a brutal past and a scar that announces him before he speaks, loses his closest friend, Liam O’Kelly, to the so-called Dragon of Dalton Lake. Gentle decides the rules of the world are negotiable, and plans to haul Liam back using the Magnum Opus, that grand alchemical recipe for conquering death. Enter Kitt, the fragile, stubborn nephew who flees a tyrant father and latches onto Gentle’s wild quest up the river and into colder, stranger country. What they want is simple, bring Liam back, what stands in the way is a landscape curdled by sightings, sickness, and the salamander’s psychic undertow, plus the small matter of killing a myth to harvest its blood.

Sheldon Costa’s background in the text reads like a writer in love with old books and older ideas. The novel leans on period journals, hermetic epigraphs, and a structure built around alchemical phases. Contents call out Prima Materia through Rubedo, which reads like a mission statement, and the story mostly honors that scaffold, with each stage tilting the mood from ruin to purification to feverish revelation. If you have ever been the person who reads marginalia in crumbling field guides for fun, this will feel like home.

The book treats belief as a physical substance. The salamander is a creature, but it is also a solvent. People drink tainted water, dream the same bad dream, and start behaving like their skulls picked up a new tenant. The early sequence with Joe Fisher and his “DEEP WATERS” warning lands hard, and the jailhouse scene where Gentle declares, perfectly serious, that he is going to kill a dragon, sells the book’s tone in one shot. Costa keeps knotting the intimate to the apocalyptic, a mule named Abe nudging a coffin like a grieving dog, a churchyard exhumation played not for transgression but for love, a town called Harmony that may be anything but. It is creature horror, yes, but the best moments are about how a community frays when a big idea, or a big animal, moves in.

The prose is chewy in a good way, frontier grit with a chemist’s vocabulary. You get sentence rhythms that clomp like boots, then slide into a herbalist’s hush. Dialogue is clean, occasionally sermon slick when alchemy enters the chat, which fits the characters, Gentle parroting Liam’s lectures, Kitt cutting through with plain questions. Costa writes bodies like a mortician who cares, blood, gas, stitching, the whole terrible tender kit, and those clinical beats make the big cosmic imagery hit harder. Pacing is where the book loses its hat. The first third hums, the river push in the middle grows repetitive, town A in ashes, town B in denial, the boys argue, the salamander vibes from offstage, until the last third finally snaps taut again. The alchemical scaffolding telegraphs that arc, which is clever, but you still feel the sag.

Under the gore and creek water the themes are grief and reinvention. Gentle is trying to alchemize loss into life, to deny the simple truth of rot. The salamander’s blood becomes a stand in for the fantasy that pain can be reversed with enough will and the right recipe. That intersects nicely with the frontier thesis, new statehood, new towns, new sins with old names. Faith and science get braided, the priest calls it a dragon, the alchemist calls it prima materia, the mill owner calls it sabotage, and the book suggests that all three labels are ways to not say the word fear. The result? Cold, medicinal numbness, like laudanum you did not quite need, plus one line that kept circling back the next morning, come find me in the deep waters.

This sits with the smarter weird westerns and expedition horrors, between a creature hunt and a metaphysical road novel. It is less brutal than something like The Terror, more earnest than Hold the Dark, and it earns its place in 2025’s crowded shelf by committing to the alchemy bit without winking. One crisp claim, this is the rare creature novel that treats taxonomy like character development.

An enjoyable trek with a distinctive alchemical frame, not fully realized in pace or payoff, but memorable for its mood, its strange tenderness, and that big white salamander gliding through the dark.

The Great Work by Sheldon Costa,
published November 4, 2025 by Quirk Books.