McKeesport native pens supernatural thriller novel

Edward Zalewski wrote the novel, “The Legend of Dunchee’s Hollow.”

By MATT PETRAS
For the MVI

After decades of off-and-on writing, McKeesport native Edward Zalewski, now semi-retired in Southern California, self-published a supernatural thriller novel that takes place in a fictionalized version of the Mon Valley.

The cover of “The Legend of Dunchee’s Hollow” is shown.

“It’s very much an homage, a love letter to the Mon Valley,” Zalewski said. “Even though I left, my heart is still there, and still, it influences the way I grew up, the way I see the world, the people, the culture.”

The 381-page novel, “The Legend of Dunchee’s Hollow,” can be purchased on Amazon as either a Kindle digital copy for $4.99 or a physical paperback book for $13.99.

Released this past April, the book takes place in the 80s and follows protagonist Stan Sikorski as he navigates spooky locales and creatures in “Ravensport,” a fictional steel town that merges the names of McKeesport and the Ravensburg Bridge, according to Zalewski.

Zalewski, who moved to California state in 1986 and worked in the IT field, attended college at the University of Pittsburgh. There, in creative writing classes, he was dismayed to learn his teachers favored literary realism instead of genre writing, he said.

“The teachers didn’t want me to write science fiction,” Zalewski said. “Science fiction, horror, fantasy, that was my genre that I enjoyed reading, and I wanted to write. But I had to come up with something literary fiction, so I said, ‘OK, well, what am I going to do?’ So I just based it off of things that were happening in my life at the time, and turned it into a novel, which I revisited over the years.”

Over the years, Zalewski picked up and put down the draft of the novel. He continued to work on his genre-fiction writing and self-published two other novels, “The Shroud Project” and “Through Her Eyes.” Eventually, he merged elements from previous drafts into something in the supernatural milieu he most enjoys.

“I get sometimes into the writing mode where I’m obsessed, and I just spend eight, 10, 12 hours a day writing,” Zalewski said.

Zalewski hoped to represent the Mon Valley way of life from decades past in the book. To do this, he combined his passion for genre fiction with memories from his upbringing and the tales told to him by his family.

“The stories my parents and relatives told me growing up there and stories about growing up in the Depression and World War II and all that stuff, and working in the factories,” Zalewski said. “I wanted to capture that. That era is kind of past, and I wanted to keep it alive and share that with people.”