I'll Still Be Here Long After You're Gone

Set in the cities, towns, and hamlets all over the midwest and points south, his stories defy easy generalizations in tone, voice, and genre. Dean's characters are often flawed, damaged, brutally real, which prompted Robert Olen Butler to write, "Dean writes like the laureate of fallen angels." He lays bear his character's often contrarian hearts on the page. In the title story, a boy learns to fight with his fists and cry with his heart. In "Faith Baby" an electrician is an addict's salvation. In "Captain Marvel Goes Down in Gigolo Hall of Fame" a middle aged man searches for a sugar mama in a nursing home and gets more than he bargained for. In "Fever" the death of a child gauges the temperature of a marriage. Clyde Edgerton wrote, "His fiction . . . is just twisted enough to hold a reader tight." These stories burn with rage, a fever-pitch hilarity, and often tragedy. His people are real and preoccupied with their relentless pursuit of imperfection just like the best of us.