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.