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

by Daren Dean

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.

271 pages, Paperback

Published December 10, 2019

About the author

Daren Dean is the author of the novel Far Beyond the Pale (2015) , I'll Still Be Here Long After You're Gone: Stories (2019), The Black Harvest: A Novel of the American Civil War (2021), and This Vale of Tears (2021). ROADS (2023). Of Roads, Ron Rash wrote, "From the opening page, Daren Dean propels the reader into his story and never taps the brakes as his characters move toward an inevitable reckoning. Dannie Gail Posey is the novel’s young heroine, and we cheer her on as she navigates a violent world that seeks to entrap her even as she dreams of escaping it. Roads confirms Daren Dean as an important new voice in rural noir." In 2025 he had three works published, The New Salvation (CJ Press), Lovesick (Louisiana Literature Press), and Shelter Me (A novel of the 2016 Louisiana Flood) Livingston Press.

Reviews

[Bill Soldan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is outstanding. It checks every box I can imagine. Poignant stories that are compulsively engaging. Check. Vivid settings and well-wrought characters. Check. Terrific dialogue and air-tight, lyrical prose. Check. Story after story told with a narrative voice as authentic as you could ask for. Check. If you like Grit Lit, this is one for you. Daren Dean has delivered a collection packed with emotional substance and bursting with heart. These folks he writes about aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty—literally and figuratively—and are rendered with such authority you might need to remind yourself you’re reading fiction. Dean’s is a sharp, clear-eyed vision, and the world he captures in these pages is one you won’t soon forget. Highly recommended reading right here.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

fave stories: mail order jesus, twinkling, fever, faith baby.