WOUNDED TACO

Leach presents a strange and deeply self-aware literary experiment that challenges readers to surrender their expectations about story structure.

Presented as a nonlinear, recursive broadcast system rather than a plot-driven narrative, the text follows a version of its author, sometimes called Cowboy Mark, through a bizarre landscape of robots, tacos, Texas mythology, severed heads, and contradictory timelines. One moment readers find the narrator recalling abandoning corporate life to launch a company, called Cowboy Mark, before receiving a Purple Heart on Uranus from fatal wounds suffered in a porta potty in the war against the Kraken. (Oh, and then robots separate his head from his body.) The next minute the author is ruminating on aging, shame, and attraction while gardening in suburban domesticity. Recurring motifs include mecha Alamos, robots, erotic brain manuals, Sylvia Plath appearances, JFK references, and increasingly metafictional reflections on authorship, criticism, and platform censorship, including reproduced emails concerning content violations and accusations that this and other works are incoherent. The book’s unconventional page design (which features different photos, starting with people with bird heads) and its fragmented structure create moments of visual and conceptual intrigue, particularly for readers drawn to experimental fiction. Yet the book’s insistence that any confusion readers encounter is intentional can feel defensive, especially when they’re repeatedly reminded that they may dislike or misunderstand the project. If a work requires a preface to explain how to read it, some may question whether the experiment has fully succeeded. While the book is clearly ambitious and intellectually playful, its absence of emotional grounding or narrative cohesion may leave many readers feeling distanced rather than challenged.

Boldly strange and undeniably committed to its vision, though often more bewildering than rewarding.