In Shelter Me, Daren Dean brings to life the residents of a struggling neighborhood in central Louisiana. Though the town of Satsuma Grove is fictional, the catastrophic flood at the heart of this novel is based on the real and unnamed 2016 disaster, during which twenty to thirty inches of rain fell over just three days in central and southern Louisiana.
Dean tells this powerful story through rotating first-person narrators. The voices include a woman with terminal cancer, a drug dealer, a prostitute, a teenager, an elderly disabled woman, and others—innocents and outcasts, busybodies and degenerates.
No matter their walk of life, they are united in shock as floodwaters rise in places that had never flooded before. Even officials were unprepared:
“No one was prepared for this kind of emergency. They were to be taken to another shelter. After that, they would be taken to yet another shelter, only to find that none of them were able to handle the sheer numbers of people who needed help.”
Still, amid the chaos, neighbors step up to help one another. As one character observes:
“It never ceased to amaze me how complete strangers pulled together when storms hit even though they might not have much to do with each other otherwise.”
Shelter Me is filled with deeply flawed yet profoundly human characters. However broken they may be, readers will find themselves rooting for them—to survive the flood, yes, but also to find safety from all the other threats in their lives.
Daren Dean
Daren Dean is the author of Far Beyond the Pale, I’ll Still Be Here Long After You’re Gone, The Black Harvest: A Novel of the American Civil War, This Vale of Tears, Roads, The New Salvation and Other Stories, and Lovesick. He earned his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Lincoln University of Missouri. His work has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the W.Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction, the Midlands Author Award, and was shortlisted for the Missouri Author Award.
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