SET IN 1921, HARRELL HICKMAN AND WILLEM REDD have returned from no man’s land and the brutality of war in the trenches in France. Neither has been able to resume what they were or might have been after living through the senselessness of crushing deaths from machine gun fire, poisonous gas, and mortars day after day after day.
Back in the U.S., Hickman walks away from an overcrowded veteran’s hospital where he is being treated for what British field doctors called “shell shock,” a devastating mental disease that now goes under the benign abstraction of PTSD. Redd, who barely survived shattering wounds returns to his family and home in Wisdom, Nebraska.
Both Hickman and Redd happen to meet in Wisdom, where Hickman ends up after hopping multiple freight trains west. The chance encounter of these damaged young men leads to a number of dramatic clashes that in their unfolding bear the semblance of foreordained Greek tragedy.
The Deadening
While Jim Beane 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, the University of Maryland, and graduated from York College. Carpentry work helped support his family while he wrote stories at night and on 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. He is a VCCA fellow and mentor for the Veterans Writing Project. Jim lives west of Baltimore with his wife Mary Ellen and family. (www.jimbeane.com)
"The book’s muscular straightforward stye and deepening nightmarish tone keeps you in its grip . . . .A powerful depiction of the psychological ravages of war.”
- KIRKUS REVIEWS"Even though Beane grants limited access to his antihero’s emotional and psychological state, Hickman’s restless and violent actions still give insight into the character and offer an unsparing view of combat trauma."
- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY"Jim Beane is a rising star in the East Coast literary scene who now shines his light onto the plains of Middle America and a time in history that foretold many of the problems we all face today."
- JAMES GRADY, AUTHOR OF SIX DAYS THE CONDOR AND THE SMOKE IN OUR EYES: A NOVEL"Like John Steinbeck, Jim Beane is drawn to what happens when the cold machinery of society grinds up an individual and spits him out. Harrell Hickman is a compelling creation: part hero, part outlaw. Told in tightly controlled, spellbinding prose, The Deadening is a marvelously wise debut novel."
K.E SEMMEL, AUTHOR OF THE BOOK OF LOSMAN"The Deadening deftly brings alive the life and death of men grasping to recover from the killing fields of World War I. Unrelenting story-telling against a stark setting."
HARRY JAFFE, CO-AUTHOR OF DREAM CITY: RACE, POWER AND THE DECLINE OF WASHINGTON, D.C.