Dead Mediums

by Dan Leach

With the dark determination of Flannery O'Connor, the inventive urgency of Haruki Murakami, and an insight and wit all his own, Leach conjures the American South with all its beauty, magic, tragedy, grace, and violence. Young boys make a dangerous deal with the vagrant who sleeps in the construction site at the edge of a trailer park. A wizard's cures bring bizarre side effects. Trying to win back his girlfriend, a penitent man crawls through the streets like a dog, plunging his college town into chaos. The stories in Dead Mediums are electrifying, gritty, compelling, and profound.

156 pages, Paperback

Published December 15, 2022

Reviews

[Jackson Culpepper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loss, irrevocable and tragically tuned, haunts the characters in this new collection from Dan Leach. His roots are clear here in the Southern gothic gaze that peers out at the world from South Carolina, with a bright splash of magical realism and booze-addled absurdity. The clearest influence here is Raymond Carver, as couples and other close relationships devolve in artful bewilderment. The collection’s main mode is tragedy, as these characters suffer fate, but also bring some of it on themselves.
These stories have appeared in some prestigious publications, and it’s clear why; they show a finely-honed craft, taking lessons from the greats like Carver, O’Connor, and Barry Hannah. My favorite is “Fixers,” the weirdest of the stories, which involves oddly shifting bodies and a wizard who runs TV commercials. I couldn’t put the story down as it twisted and turned, and the central theme of it stuck with me for a long time afterward. In some ways, it ties together the handful of stories here about couples drifting (or shattering) apart, by asking just how much happiness and change we can expect from someone else. “Places without Porches” and “The Five Stages of Hunger” explore a similar dynamic around grief and its disruption, while “A Forest Dark and Deep” takes the theme to a very dark place indeed.
Leach works with flash fiction here as well, with “Wasp Queen” being a particularly poignant meditation on death, grief, and the complicated culpability we can carry for it. Between the longer, more traditional stories, and the shorter, more experimental ones (which echo Carole Maso, interestingly), Leach creates an interestingly polyphonic arrangement, sounding one strange and open chord across the collection.
Maybe I’m not the person to comment too deeply on Southern gothic (having left the south because it became a little too actually gothic), but we do get a Carolina-rooted examination of the lengths of grief (and the midwest) in “Places without Porches.” I’ve spent my share of time sipping bourbon under a haint-blue porch, but I still found the narrator to be unfair to Nebraskans, even if I understand his extreme situation: staying for more than a year with a partner moved west to grieve her father. The collection’s closer, “The Devil is Beating his Wife,” is a poignant debauch set in Clemson in the 80’s. I appreciated its themes of being an outsider and questioning the south–a reframing of Quentin and Shreve, perhaps.
Overall, Leach is getting better and better at his craft. I’d personally like to see more weirdness, but there’s a big crowd for the literary Southern gothic out there too. This is a collection to see the ways Southern fiction is developing, in continuing the classical literary tradition and also getting real weird with it.

I did receive a free copy of the book for review, but my opinions are my own.

[Aria · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing collection. Leach offers up an eclectic mix of strange and sometimes grim stories with an intense humanity running through the whole them all.

The hype blurb on the back of the book begins “with the dark determination of Flannery O’Connor…”, but make no mistake, this is not some Southern gothic pastiche. But I certainly felt some of that “dark determination” through Leach’s own modern voice.

Highly recommended for anyone.

[Matthew Meade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dan Leach has been thinking about this stuff for years. He’s in the bar even though he’s trying to quit drinking. He’s asking you for a light even though he’s trying to quit smoking. He’s talking to your girlfriend even though you’ve been together for years. Dan Leach has so much to tell you. He’s been waiting outside your job, sleeping on your couch, leaving you voicemails you never listen to. He’s relentless and he won’t leave you alone.

Dan Leach writes fiction akin to the guy on the train who corners you and starts telling you so much of his life that you simultaneously want him to stop and to keep going.

Dan Leach is quickly becoming the south’s answer to Haruki Murakami. The confrontational stories in this collection are like magic spells drunk on moonshine, weaving their woozy divinations into your head. Because they are meant to describe you, me, and our modern age, they can’t help but be as conniving as a Rick Flair promo, as mean as a two-dollar firecracker, and as Christ-haunted as Flannery O’Connor’s subconscious. You will keep thinking about these knowing, sunburnt fables long after you’ve finished this book.

[Houlcroft · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a genuine delight to read. There’s a poignancy to Leach’s writing, a gentle conveyance of depth and beauty to his words, from the opening conversation between a man and the wasps he’s planning on killing, to the ongoing meditations on relationships and all the joy and pain they contain. There’s so much loss in the stories though, so much sadness. Five Stages of Hunger actually had me in tears as I finished reading it, sitting in a cafe with some breakfast, trying to keep them to myself.
Absolutely stunning.

Best paired with an elixir bought from a wizard on tv, a mouthful of a meal you don’t even want, and a crawl across town on your hands and knees

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The longer stories in this collection are the stars. I read "A Forest Dark and Deep" anxious to get to the end while backtracking to reread Leach's beautiful prose. It's stunning, the kind of story that sticks with you. Other standouts include "Fixers," "The Devil Is Beating His Wife," and "Places Without Porches."