Set in 1921 in the raw American west, Harrell Hickman and Willem Redd, two American doughboys, have returned to the states traumatized by the brutality and killings of trench warfare in France. Neither has been able to resume what he was or might have become after living through the senselessness of crushing death. In a tone recollective of All Quiet on the Western Front and Louis Lamour’s frontier novels, the sentences of Jim Beane’s compelling debut novel are unrelenting — his intense storytelling has the feel of foreordained Greek tragedy.
JIM BEANE. While Jim has published more than a score of short stories, The Deadening is his first novel. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in the Maryland suburbs, he attended the US Coast Guard Academy for two years, had a brief stay at the University of Maryland, and graduated from York College. Carpentry work helped support his family while he wrote stories at night and weekends. His short story collection, By the sea, by the sea was published in 2019 by Wordrunners eChapbooks. His stories have appeared in Worker’s Write, winner of the 2017 Tillie Olsen Award for creative writing, DC Noir, The MacGuffin, The Baltimore Review, O-Dark-Thirty and other literary journals. Jim has been an instructor in creative writing at The Writer’s Center (Bethesda, Maryland), a fiction judge for Bethesda Magazine and a creative writing instructor for the Armed Services Arts Partnerships program. He is a VCCA fellow and mentor for the Veterans Writing Project. Jim lives west of Baltimore with his wife Mary Ellen and family.