The middle stories of the collection see DeLillo working more explicitly with trauma. In these stories the characters are deranged by shocking events. In the collection's title story, "The Angel Esmeralda", a 12-year-old girl is raped and thrown off a rooftop. After the killing, a crowd gathers before a billboard fruit juice advertisement that shows an apparition of the girl's face. One night the advertisement is replaced by a white sheet and the apparition disappears. "And what do you remember, finally," DeLillo writes, "when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope, swept by river wind?"

The collection's strongest story is "Hammer and Sickle". It's an endless puzzle, a work of limitless connections. Jerold Bradway is an inmate at a minimum security "camp" for white-collar criminals. Each day his two daughters appear on TV to read a news report on crumbling financial markets. The inmates become transfixed by the girls, yelling and clamouring in a scene reminiscent of the Two Minutes' Hate in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Towards its end the story boils with Orwellian terror. The final four pages, with Bradway standing on a highway bridge watching cars pass beneath him — "Why don't they crash all the time?" — contain the collection's most beautiful writing.

Reading these stories I was reminded of David Foster Wallace's annoyance at fiction that's stuck on the idea we're becoming less human. What interested Wallace was how we "still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections". DeLillo has written about this dehumanising effect for 40 years, yet his work, and these stories, still allow for the possibility of connections between people. Flung out in space, Vollmer, one of the astronauts in "Human Moments in World War III", finds consolation in "graduation pictures, bottle caps, small stones from his backyard". Something strange happens to him up there, but like us down here, Vollmer is still capable of human moments.