From the Anglo-American woman who makes a spectacle of herself trying to be Cuban, to the estranged son leading his father on a hostile hike in New Mexico, Valeri's characters are loaded with desire and anger. The stories grow through subtle shifts, and reveal unexpected moments of clarity.
A middle class Italian family finds reason to immigrate to America when Italy is threatened by the Red Brigades’ terrorist movement of the 1970s. The family patriarch manages a transfer to the United States, certain of better prospects and of a more secure future for his family, but each of the family members experiences a deeper kind of upheaval, negotiating personal losses and estrangement. A grandmother, a mother, and a granddaughter each discovers the many insidious ways in which war warps and defines life, even at a distance of decades.
Mapping stories set in Europe and America, The Dead Still Here skillfully paces through eleven short stories about friends-with-benefits typed relationships, vicious divorces and thievery, the loss of a child, the loss of a mother, and the Coast Guard and the Navy rescuing refugees from a bad storm at sea. Laura Valeri writes one single breathtaking sentence about sex, Dear John emails, and Christmas presents in “Liabilities of a Love Misguided” and displays a sharp sense of paranoia based on everyone looking at the narrator, laughing, whispering in “What They Know.” Along with characters that are irrevocably locked in their heads, Valeri includes a guide on how to take medication in “Prescription for Life,” which subtly points to the other hallucinatory narratives. This collection is at once provocative and lucid, and it offers various angles of characters looking for a relationship to hold.
