Books by Steven Leech

Freddy Powmia gets drafted into the U.S. Army in 1966 and is sent to Vietnam. First, he gets involved in the war, then gets involved with the Vietnamese people. After immersing himself socially through their culture, he ultimately disappears into their country, ironically enough by way of fragments of the American counter-culture.

Untime is a novel about the clash of parallel worlds. Its landscape is eerily familiar while boiling over under the heat of vodoun and confused quanta. Written in the post-literate style, icons of American culture go underground in the face of American Nazism. Set largely in Wilmington, Delaware and New York City and on the silver screen, in burlesque theatres, seedy hotels, and comic strips that are transplanted in suburbia, UNTIME depicts an anomalous world at the edge.

2000 YEARS is an excursion on the eschatological dark side, an orgy of blasphemy and an iconoclastic bombardment of our modern world. Filled with passion, sensuality, and eroticism, while brimming with horrific and masochistic imagery, 2000 YEARS is a love story without any hope. It is a treatise of excruciating loneliness and transcendent despair.

Hapless but hardboiled gumshoe Wences Minion begins by getting involved in a series of salacious capers in a Nazified America of the early 1970s. In a work part sexual slapstick, part science fiction, Minion is lured to into a world he never expects, hurtling toward an outcome that's no less surprising.

Raw Suck is a revolutionary novel that unveils multiple worlds hidden in plain sight, in the neighborhoods abandoned by the American Dream, in the history where the good guys only pretended to win, in the somnambulance that substitutes for living. The landscape is called autoexistence, where everything from credit cards to asphalt to fast food extrudes from petroleum, with human beings reduced to oil junkies on their knees. Sound familiar? Raw Suck, indeed.

While Poe's daughter never makes an appearance in Poe’s Daughter, Pym’s Soul, her presence is felt in the lives of those most affected by slavery and impending Civil War. Poe's daughter becomes a force that brings people together to change history from the one that actually transpired. The novel also uses the actual words of John Lofland, Delaware's first renowned and now largely unknown literary artist. Selections from this novel earned the author two fellowship grants from the Delaware Division of the Arts.

Wilmington born artist Jonathan Bragdon said that Steven Leech "has a poet's feel for the way words work, and a journalist's sense of the significant. Wedgehorn Manifesto marks, I hope, a turning point in the effort to preserve from destruction the habitat in our collective memory of the many talented story tellers, poets, picture makers, and musicians, who helped make life bearable for innumerable ordinary folk, and in fact made possible the fine culture of the luckier few."
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This is the second edition of four stories that convey the crushing weight of failure amidst the inevitable tenacity of hope. Beginning with a fable inspired by Delaware author Christopher Ward's novel "Starling," the central figure assumes an unworldly character so that his true self can survive in an alien world. $5.00.

The cover of PINHEAD #4 displays Steven Leech’s great-grandfather and grandfather in front of the family store at 7th & Church Streets around the time Tux Munce may have been living nearby as a young man. Munce is a fictional Wilmington author of the early 20th century, who gets involved with the characters created in Delaware fiction as well as with real life people like 3 Gun Wilson, Daisy Winchester, Crash Peyton, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, Pauline Young, and others. His travels take him from Argentina to the underbelly of the Cold War. Munce’s only novel is the newly discovered Willow Run about the 1903 lynching at Price’s Corner. Samples of Munce’s published work are included. 78 pages. $5.00.

The Last Place on Earth is a place where hope itself conveys hopelessness. It is a place where humanity verges on becoming abstract, without identity, without recourse to recourse. It is where we’ve been waiting in disbelief for our world to crumble. It is finally the place where we disappear. It is simply too late! 45 pages. $5.00

A good companion to Steven Leech's The Wedgehorn Manifesto, A City of Ghosts fills in some details of both an actual and speculative nature. Using both fact and fiction, the author delves a little deeper and coaxes those ghosts to reveal their selves. Along with Delaware author Henry Seidel Canby, he explores the Brandywine River's influence on us. We feel the spirit of Wilmington's jazz legends rising up after an emissary from the beginning of The Jazz Age visits, teaches and mentors young local musicians. Ghosts begin to emerge from Wilmington's east side, among artists and musicians alike. Now we can give them names, making a record of them in A City of Ghosts.
A native from Wilmington, Steven Leech proves to be only a degree or two of separation from an expanding world. Herein is his brief encounter with Ayn Rand, a degree of separation from "the lost generation" of the 1920s and Depression era 1930s, from the local literary generation before him, and among artists hidden by circumstance. Herein is our history of the local counter culture from the Sixties. Herein is the history of local public poetry readings, along with those whom we should never forget.