There was one last book on my schedule for the end of 2025 that made its way onto store shelves in late December. Its cover features a delightfully large white salamander looking coy and suspect as it crawls all over the page surrounded by a vibrant and lush forest. The Great Work, by Sheldon Costa, promised a compelling story about the search for immortality at the end of the frontier in the American west. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite live up to its grand intentions.
Gentle has just been given warning by the town sheriff, get out or get killed. His crime? Being caught graverobbing. All Gentle really wanted was to exhume his best friend’s corpse and preserve it long enough to find the philosopher’s stone and bring him back. When his nephew, Kitt, shows up at his cabin in the far reaches of the Pacific Northwest, he decides to take him on his journey deep into the woods to gather the blood of a mythical salamander that has been haunting the dreams of the townsfolk for years, including Gentle’s dead best friend and mentor in the ways of alchemy, Liam. It isn’t long before the two run into Hercules, a big game hunter from New York, the cult known as the Sons of Adam, and a small army funded privately by the Reverend Judge. Will Gentle be able to weather the apocalyptic dreams to find the salamander before the others kill it?
I was genuinely intrigued by the concept – not just lured by the promise of a great white whale… I mean salamander. Costa really drew me in early with Gentle’s manic plans to kidnap his friend’s dead body before the Sheriff comes to hang him. And then having a wrench thrown into the gears of that plan with the arrival of his nephew he’d never met before. The edge of the American expansion felt blurry and dangerous even to people who earned their living within it. There was a vague sense of weirdness revolving around the dreams that people were having, blaming a dragon within the forests of the peninsula. There are rambling old men, legends disappearing into the woods and returning with apocalyptic agendas aimed at humanity’s salvation. And a Teddy Roosevelt-like figure out on the hunt for the dragon and fame. The Great Work starts strong with a slow deliberate stride that lets the atmosphere of the “old west” sink in. I was sold.
It wasn’t long before I started to run into a bit of a slog though. The narrative is told in the first person, though one slightly detached from its surroundings. It felt less like Gentle was recalling a set of events, than he was trying to decipher the present in front of him. Kind of like someone narrating their day to themselves in the moment, filled with small private jokes that keep one chasing the dream. It was endearing, but it slowly started to reveal some of the novel’s shortcomings. The descriptions started to focus on individuals’ physical characteristics instead of the surroundings and Gentle’s reactions to them. Sections became unending dialogues about what has happened, what could happen and what might be happening. Gentle often relied on his medicinal deemed “Ole Vitriol,” to get him through the day (side note: amazing moniker for a concoction that was basically just ether). Gentle’s own commentary began to take a backseat, and when it did appear, it felt inconsistent and at times a little too modern for my taste in a story like this.
I often felt that Gentle was a passenger in his own body witnessing the world around him, unable to act or react to it. His sole focus was finding the salamander to harvest some of its blood to bring back his friend and mentor. And that didn’t even feel at the front of his mind very often. The revelation of what “Ole Vitriol” is explains some of the detachment, but I found it lacking depth – especially considering that large concentrations, of which Gentle was using, would cause hallucinations and confusion along with the euphoria. And that leads to my next gripe, where the hell were the visions and the nightmares?
Everyone but Gentle seemed to be having apocalyptic visions as a result of being near the salamander. Gentle experiences it one time later in the novel and it’s nothing really to write home about. It is, in my opinion, a pretty cookie cutter description of a world on fire. Its description left me wanting and I didn’t feel any sort of apprehension from Gentle. Meanwhile, people in the frontier have started their own doomsday cult. A judge has hired a private army to squash them out. Others living their own lives have learned to cope with the nightmare as they eke out a living in a semi-communal utopia that relies on trade with the mainland. And Gentle just is sort of there, a shade to guide us through the underworld, providing vague commentary while everyone else engages in verbal and physical contests about the future of the frontier. I think my frustration stems from the fact that the senses that we view the story—a story about an environment on the edge, filled with dangerous, vivacious characters, some of whom are lost, others are just looking to make the next buck—we are saddled with the most boring and inoffensive person just trying to bring his friend back to life. I would have less of an issue with it if he was more like Charon, or any sort of mythical guide dishing out wry ironic commentary meant to impart a lesson to the audience. Instead, I feel like we’re meant to feel an inner conflict within him that manifests in the world around him, but his detachment from the surroundings make those connections vague and unmoored.
And while there are certainly some interesting scenes that occur, the majority of the action and the meat of The Great Works’ themes occur within the last fifty pages of the book. All of the factions and characters that Gentle encounters clash in a near final battle for the frontier. Secrets are revealed about the cult that are genuinely fascinating and hint at a psychology different from our own, but borne out of the same christian millenarianism we are suffused with today. The battle feels hectic and the ones that you want to root for, are clearly outgunned. There is an intensity inherent to the situation that is unfortunately not captured by the language. And in the end, Gentle is just sort of there, and has no idea what the hell just happened. There wasn’t any particular examination on his part beyond the usual “humans just be humans,” and “oh god are we just a disease?” And I generally dislike those sorts of conclusions because it does a few things. It robs characters of any agency, avoids engaging with the conversation it purports to be interested in, and it’s just a dull platitude that leaves the reader with nothing to chew on themselves. I took particular issue with it in The Great Work because there are so many places, characters, and events that allow for the conversation to branch out into the various things that we do as social creatures that can be considered disease-like, that are choices, conscious or unconscious, about how we engage with the world. Instead, the novel ends up being the literary equivalent of “why can’t we just be nice?”
I know I’m starting to fall into “old man yelling at clouds,” territory with some of these climate change coded books, but it does feel a tad shitty to see so many just fall into “well, I guess this is something we have to deal with because humans…amirite?” So much of my thoughts around these issues has evolved since I started caring after watching Ferngully a million times as a child, but it’s disenchanting that there are so many newer books that kind of throw their hands up especially when they are so cognizant of the various bits of history that have led us to where we are. The Great Work falls short because it dances with those historical stories that we tell ourselves about who we are as citizens of the United States and the brutality with which we “solidified” the nation, and then just sort of shrugs them off as “human nature,” without really exploring what that means. I’m not saying it needed to capture the entirety of the subject and distill it, I just felt that it was incurious about its own subject matter, and that frustrates me.
Rating: The Great Work – The Frontier is dead and so is my sympathy for it.
-Alex
