Set during a doom-fated vacation to the Oregon coast, The Disappointment follows a couple trying to hold close to one another while a bent reality–warped by personal losses and an ever-increasing drift toward the surreal–threatens to unravel them

It’s the night before a much-needed vacation, and Jack–a former playwright mourning his failed career–catches his husband, Randy, packing his mother’s urn. They had agreed: no mother on this trip. Parents, living or otherwise, aren’t the ideal guests for romantic getaways. But Randy has been carrying his mother’s remains everywhere since her death, and he isn’t ready to let go now.

Despite its natural beauty and kitschy charm, the Oregon coast does not provide the respite the couple seeks. Instead, their surroundings and encounters with locals grow increasingly surreal as the days pass. An overly dedicated Method actor, tantra-obsessed neighbors, and a child environmentalist who may be able to communicate with the dead are but a few of the characters whose presence exposes long-simmering tensions that threaten to undo Jack and Randy’s marriage–to say nothing of their hold on reality.

Told with sly, irreverent humor and shot through with dark currents of envy and longing for something other than what one has, The Disappointment explores the mutual exhilaration and terror of being placed center stage in one’s own life.

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 Love

An 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 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.