He wandered over to a stump and sat down to watch the river flow over the side of the cliff. It fell a good thirty or forty feet, carving a glossy chute down the stone face and into the overgrown valley below, where it erupted into a cloud of white mist that settled slowly over the surrounding vegetation, dappling the ferns with a thousand glinting gemstones. Somehow, the moisture reached Gentle’s face, and no matter how fervently he wiped the droplets from his cheeks, they kept on falling.
Terrific nature writing, first rate depictions of both platonic and another kind of close male friendships, powerful ecological messaging, female characters with agency, and redneck alchemists, y'all! I started 2026 with a hell of a read.
OK, I'll settle down a bit.
Our heroes are a precocious pre-teen boy, Kitt, and his lost soul of an uncle, Gentle, who's only kept life and soul together in the pre-statehood foothills of what will become Washington State through the help and friendship of a frontier alchemist, Liam, hard at work to create the phliosophick stone, the titular Great Work, out in the as-yet unspoiled wilderness of the western United States ca. 1890 or so. Only as our story starts the settlement of which they're kind of a part is suddenly all ahoo over reports of a cryptid, the giant, ghost-white salamander Maryann Held depicted on the book cover, which haunts their daily visits to the river and their nightly dreams -- and Liam has gotten himself killed trying to hint down the monster, in the belief that the Prima Materia he still lacks for his formula will be found in the salamander's blood.
Gentle, a drunken ne'er-do-well on the run from his powerful family back in Ohio when Liam saved his life years ago, now has to tough it out without his friend, face his grief and find a way to go on living - but some men would rather try to raise their bestie from the dead than go to therapy, yannow.
Enter Kitt, who, it turns out, is on the run from the same family as Gentle, being Gentle's young nephew, who was no more inclined to put up with Gentle's older brother's abuse than Gentle himself was a generation ago, and has high-tailed it out to try his luck with his black sheep of an uncle. Before we know it, the pair have set out from the late, lamented Liam's laboratory, with Liam's embalmed corpse strapped to the back of a scene-stealing old mule named Abe (it should surprise no one that Abe is the best character. I would die for Abe) and gone off in quest of the salamander once and for all.
Alas, this weird party is only a step or two ahead of the mighty and implacable forces of civilization, in the person of The Reverend Judge Crane and a few lesser mortals, already hard at work logging and mining and damming and settling everything they can see, and to hell with the already mostly exterminated indigenous peoples, and the odd settler types with a less extractive outlook on the landscape, who stand in its way.
Further complicating matters are a secret village of frontier anarchist free-love types AND a roving band of Civil War veterans and other freebooter types who have formed a weird cult around the salamander and its prophet that's straight out of "The Call of Cthulhu," minus the swamp.
With this much plot it's hard to believe there's good character work in here, too, but there is. It's not entirely evenly distributed; the various adversarial figures are a bit cartoonish, but most of the bystanders and secondary heroes are given a chance to manifest as real a set of people as Kitt and Gentle and Abe** do.
But what really makes The Great Work, uhh, work, is the inherent tension supplied by the questions that pulls the reader through it: just how much disbelief are we supposed to suspend, here? Does alchemy actually work in this alternate Cascadia? Or is Christianity "right?" Is the salamander an actual living creature or just an egregore, a shared delusion employed to explain the many things these settlers still don't understand about the land they think they've conquered? Whose promises and prophecies, if any, will be fulfilled? Are these beliefs all just competing delusions, or are some of them "real?" Or all of them?
I'm not going to tell you whether or not any of these questions get explicitly answered, anymore than I'm going to tell you if Abe makes it out alive. There's a website for that. Though this book is still pretty new, especially for something Your Humble Blogger has read. But what I will tell you is that I feel like Costa is going to be an author to watch, that has me curious about what he's going to do next, and that I'm grateful indeed to the Discord friend of mine who casually mentioned this book in our year-end ravings about what we thought the best books of 2025 were. It pays to have friends with taste!
*Here's our first sight of one of them. Tell me this guy, who is also seven feet tall with a thorough-going gentleman's education, wouldn't stop you in your tracks, if not make you want to run the other way. Or compliment his fashion sense?:
The hunter turned to look at them more closely. Gentle had a clearer view of the rest of his strange outfit, now. His coat and chaps, stitched together out of tanned hides, hung over his body in rigid plates, like the carapace of a giant beetle. On his feet he wore a pair of high-ankle cattleman boots made of alligator skin. The hunter had kept the alligators’ snouts and fangs intact, so that each foot ended in a snarling reptilian sneer.
**Don't you even try to tell me a mule can't be people. He's the Bill the Pony of the Weird Western genre. IYKYK.
The space was not large enough for the mule to fit inside, and after some cajoling Gentle was able to maneuver around the animal and squeeze into the crack. He turned back, grabbed Abe’s head in his hands, and pressed their foreheads together. “Go,” he whispered. “Please go. I’ll find Kitt. I promise.” The mule, as if embarrassed by this display, yanked his head away and snorted a wet blast of air into Gentle’s face. “Fine,” Gentle said. “Wait for us here, you stubborn bastard.”
