Jennifer Giesbrecht

The Monster of Elendhaven is a novella about an industrial northern city poisoned by its own factories, a creature that cannot be killed climbing out of the filth, and the sorcerer who works out a use for him. It is short, genuinely nasty, and completely uninterested in redeeming anybody, which is the design rather than a failure of nerve. Giesbrecht is Canadian, from Halifax, and came out of a science fiction writing workshop. It appeared in a line of standalone novellas that made that length commercially viable again after decades in which no publisher would touch it.