In a collapsing version of Texas where reality runs on loops, signals, and broken broadcasts, Cowboy Mark is trying to make sense of whatâs left.
WOUNDED TACO is a surreal, darkly comic novel where robots control the systems, memory behaves like television, and the past wonât stay buriedâit keeps replaying, slightly altered each time. Scenes repeat. Identities shift. Meaning flickers in and out like static.
As Cowboy Mark moves through this fractured landscapeâpart cultural myth, part personal reckoningâhe confronts a world shaped by media saturation, technological takeover, and emotional absence. Human and machine blur. Desire and nostalgia collide. Even Texas itself begins to crack open, revealing something stranger underneath.
Told through a series of looping fragments rather than a traditional plot, WOUNDED TACO builds its story through accumulation and variation, inviting readers into a narrative that must be experienced as much as understood.
Blending satire, science fiction, and confessional storytelling, this is a novel about repetition, identity, and what remains when the signal never stops.
In a collapsing version of Texas where reality runs on loops, signals, and broken broadcasts, Cowboy Mark is trying to make sense of whatâs left.
WOUNDED TACO is a surreal, darkly comic novel where robots control the systems, memory behaves like television, and the past wonât stay buriedâit keeps replaying, slightly altered each time. Scenes repeat. Identities shift. Meaning flickers in and out like static.
As Cowboy Mark moves through this fractured landscapeâpart cultural myth, part personal reckoningâhe confronts a world shaped by media saturation, technological takeover, and emotional absence. Human and machine blur. Desire and nostalgia collide. Even Texas itself begins to crack open, revealing something stranger underneath.
Told through a series of looping fragments rather than a traditional plot, WOUNDED TACO builds its story through accumulation and variation, inviting readers into a narrative that must be experienced as much as understood.
Blending satire, science fiction, and confessional storytelling, this is a novel about repetition, identity, and what remains when the signal never stops.
IN THE BEGINNING God created the heavens and Texas. The Almighty molded the Lone Star State from a piece of the great cosmic taco, a smear of queso across the Milky Way.
This is my country. Native Texan by birth and dream. Iâve spent my entire life here. I plan to stay here forever. Or to put it in the spirit of Bob Wills, Iâm gonna live her till I die. That means something, or at least it used to.
Somewhere along the way, Texas changed. Not the land. The people. Old friends left or died. Strangers began to remake the culture. They brought their own vision. They knocked off the stateâs idiosyncratic edges and painted over everything in flat shades of greige. They let their yippy dogs poop on my lawn. They brought kombucha. But still I didnât leave. Texas seemed a good place to realize the mathematical equations of my destiny:
Cowboy Markâs algebra of the external environment reassembled within him as a private architecture of stress converted into desire. This heightened sensitivity suggested not neurosis but an attempt to recover a lost symmetry. The cityâs asymmetries provoked in him a compensatory fantasy of perfect form. He sought a return to origin, where all surfaces curved inward and no perspective could fracture.
And then came the robots.
Part 1: The Big Robot Hard On
Cowboy Mark filmed his psychopathological fantasy of perfect form onto the padded contours of Subject X, a 1960s lingerie model dreaming of a career in SF cinema. He was obsessed with her at the celluloid level, projecting her ah-h into the sky on channel 3.
This is all true.
The space alien parts are reasonably accurate. The Kraken really do look like octopus or squid, flailing arms and quivering cosmic jelly. These squidâmy parents, actuallyâcome from a planet of boiling oceans and searing sandstorms. They like it hot. Here in summertime Texas, mom and dad are feeling just fine. No need for AC. Just open the window and enjoy a bed sheet of unbreathable polyester. Not third-grade me. Soon I am covered in sweat. TV Dracula scratches at the window screen.
"Not tonight, Count,â I say, pulling the sheet over my head. "Iâm already busy dying.â
The robots are truthful enough: a collection of parts, scattered and accumulating like taco crumbs under a vinyl booth in a cosmic diner. Some of them speak in stock market ticker symbols, believing that language should be both cryptic and deeply unsatisfying. Others are self-loathing cyborgs, attempting to uninstall themselves from the Amarillo Static Field with tragic incompetence. Some are helpful, like the ones who save Dear Wife and me from being eaten by a sea monster at the end (or rather, one of the ends) of this book. And my favorite? The robot who insists that humans never existed until I personally imagined them. That makes me feel good â good and powerful and guilty. (I sure made a mess of things, right?)
And then, of course, thereâs the singularity.
We all remember the day the robots took over the banks, the stock markets, the ATMs. In an instant, our financial accounts collapsed to zero. Mobile phone contracts were canceled. No more morning lattes. Instead, human/bird hybrids screamed in the streets. A new reality, a living nightmare. Soon, we were smoking their high-quality cigarettes (no, donât take even one puff!), clutching our useless phones and debit cards, crying out for double caffeinated justice.
"Why?" we wailed at our new robotic overlords. "Why did you do this?"
The robots, cool and rational, replied:
âWhy do you have erections?"
Point made, my robot friends. Point made.
#
After youâve published perhaps the longest novel ever written, what do you do for an encore? Mark Leachâs mega-gargantuan âMarienbad My Loveâ (17 volumes) makes âInfinite Jestâ look like flash fiction. Leachâs new novel, âWounded Taco,â is a slim 70,000 words, although it embodies some equally glib and grandiose prose.
In the preface, the author advises readers that this book âis a nonlinear, recursive narrative constructed as a broadcast system rather than a traditional, plot-driven novel.â Itâs sort of a cross between Douglas Adamsâs âHitchhikerâs Guide to the Galaxyâ and Italo Calvinoâs âInvisible Cities,â with undercurrents of the Unabomber Manifesto. Parts of it may elicit laughter, reflection, groans, and/ or head-scratching, but collectively those parts donât cohere into anything resembling a story.
Leach describes his work as âSpace Writing,â a conceptual literature thatâs âcreator-centric,â not âcustomer-centricâ He writes in the first-person, in the persona of his alter-ego, Cowboy Mark, âa disembodied head, preserved in a beaker, rescued by creatures from another world that look like an appetizer from Red Lobster.â
Those afore-mentioned creatures would be the Kraken, tentacled extraterrestrial beings closely related to Earthly squid. After the robot revolution that overthrew humanity, the Kraken defeated the androids and rescued Cowboy Markâs head, then transported it to their planet. There, supported by the Hive Mind, which speaks to him âthrough squid synapse chains and robotic memory tanks,â Mark comes to be worshipped unto a God by the robots.
As best as I can discern, the overarching âWounded Taco Projectâ represents what remains of Texas, populated not by individuals but, âarchetypes, chlorinated fragments of a collective mythos that stretches back to Crockett and Bowie, and forward into the vacuum of a future where nothing remains but the machinery of decay.â Amid so much dissolution, the shared experience of the Kennedy assassination retains mythological significance. Such is its âTexasosity.â
This isnât a book that one reads, so much as interprets. Leachâs vision is both inane and profound, and thoroughly hallucinogenic. Albeit maddeningly digressive, the text packs a rhetorical punch and its myriad themes, however bizarre, expound legitimate insight. And it's funny. Leach acknowledges criticism that his work is incomprehensible, but rebuts, âincoherent text is the only true reflection of the world.â He's not wrong.
Reviewing this book by quantifiably rating it with stars doesnât really make sense. Itâd be more accurate to rate it with question marks. Still, rules are rules. Four stars.