Old South, My Ass
Reviews
By Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster
“Old South, my ass” says the narrator of “The Devil Is Beating His Wife,” the final story in Dan Leach’s Dead Mediums. The narrator is referring to an oversized-truck-driving racist who’s harassing his love-stricken friend, but his statement also feels like an apt summation of where these ten stories take us: from South Carolina coastal islands and college towns to Nebraska farmhouses frozen by winter grief.
In these pages, the “Old South” casts a long—and adversarial—shadow, something to be stripped away, like a sweat-soaked shirt after cutting the grass on a summer Sunday. Still, it’s a burden we have to carry, as the subject of “Brother Bill Leaves the Narrow Path” learns after years of wrestling and reckoning with a childhood spent in the indoctrination vineyard of a Deep South Evangelical Christian upbringing: “What you say is up to you. Maybe you’ll tell them where you come from. Or maybe you’ll tell them where you’re going.”
Leach’s characters reckon with crises, both external and of their own making. Decisions made (or left unmade), the disappearances and reappearances of strange love. In “Lockjaw” two kids brought together by life in the same trailer park holler meet unexpected disaster in the form of the derelict alcoholic they’ve enlisted to buy them porn. After his wife learns of his infidelity, the narrator of “A Forest Dark and Deep” acquiesces to a cuckolding arrangement that quickly devolves into something more unsettling and dangerous—so much so that the narrator’s wife disappears one night, never to be seen or heard from again, by her husband or anyone else. Leach ratchets up the tension by alternating the events culminating in this disappearance with the narrator’s present-day idyll, watching fireworks with his new wife and young child. But the sudden and inexplicable appearance of his first wife’s lover in his family’s suburban neighborhood one night sends him on a sudden ill-advised pursuit. His search for answers he’s not even certain he wants but is compelled to confront nevertheless brings him to a dark, lonesome, low country back road, the fireworks at which he’s left his family still visible above. Even when one mystery is resolved, it only reveals further depths. In Dead Mediums, any revelation (however brief and unsatisfying) only further muddies the murk in which Leach’s characters find or happen to have placed themselves.
The collection unfolds like an expertly sequenced album (in fact, I’m jealous and a little upset that I didn’t think of its title myself), and, at a slim 139 pages, it feels expertly pared down to what’s essential. The stories ebb and flow, varying in length and pace. For example, there is a triptych of stories in Dead Mediums in which Leach’s narrators directly address and even interrogate various wildlife, again utilizing very badass-sounding and zoologically correct terminology (“Wasp Queen” and “Whale Fall”). These pieces are each relatively short and act as brilliant palate cleansers. A harsher critic might be tempted to say they don’t carry as much weight as the longer, arguably more central, stories here do. But, by presenting incidental collisions with nature, Leach is setting the reader up for the epochal confrontations that demarcate the “before” and “after” for his characters. That Leach manages to limn these moments so skillfully and with such economy is no mean feat. Even though I’ve returned to Dead Mediums several times in recent months I’m surprised each time by how quickly and seamlessly Leach works his magic.
And there is magic here, literally as well as figuratively. Leach often welcomes the element of “the weird” (quotes mine) into his stories. In “Fixers”, the narrator is plagued by one monstrous inexplicable physical deformity after another until he’s driven to consult with a television-sales-wizard. The hilarious oddity of the narrator’s tragicomic, cosmic debt escalates from there. In fact, Leach’s embrace of humor in the midst of strange, dark fairy-tale happenings reminds me of another writer I’ve recently been introduced to: Robert Aickman. There are multiple moments in Dead Mediums that held me in genuine suspense—just shy of what I might call fear—a sensation I associate most recently with Aickman’s work. But I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered this feeling in a work that isn’t “genre” or explicitly marketed as such. At the risk of repeating myself, I am deeply impressed by the lines Leach walks in his fiction. His commitment to entwining realism with the unreal in ways that just work, all without drawing attention to themselves or the reader out of the narrative, is to be envied.
JPKS is a songwriter living in Fayetteville, AR with his wife Megan and their three dogs. His projects include solo work, the band Water Liars, and the duo Marie/Lepanto (with Will Johnson).
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