Assessment:
Plot: Tight and proudly pulpy, Jim Yeazel's "An Unknown Shore" spins a tense tale of monster hunting in the upper Midwest in the 1950s. The setup is familiar, and jurisdictional and political wrangling complicate the plot. Some of the political spats between Beane and an ex-chief and a current sheriff aren't as gripping as the monster mystery, but Yeazel excels at scenes of planning and debating how to handle a potentially supernatural threat, and he's especially good at measuring the toll this bloody adventure takes on the psyche of its hero.
Prose/Style: Yeazel writes crisp, memorable dialogue, and his horror action is pared to the bone. Scenes of suspense achieve their aim, and Yeazel finds some bleak poetry in gore. Yeazel relies too often, however, on sentence fragments for their abrupt one-detail-at-a-time effect, drawing readers' attention to his repetitive technique during scenes when they should be caught up in the horror.
Originality: Yeazel invests his familiar story with real feeling and tension, plus some surprising folkloric roots and compelling challenges that demand the protagonist grow. But that fresh skin is still stretched over a familiar stop-the-monster frame, and few readers won't occasionally think of "Jaws" or similar stories. Fans of that kind of story will savor the author's ingenuity and skill, but Yeazel is playing squarely within the confines of his genre rather than expanding them.
Character Development: Chief Beane is an alcoholic haunted by the war and wracked with guilt and desire over his history with Helen. Meanwhile, the ex-chief and the sheriff resent Beane and accuse him of theft. As he steels himself for the job of stopping the beast that's murdering people in his town, Beane must face all those issues and more. Plot and characterization are tightly bound in "An Unknown Shore," urging each other along. That said, Yeazel's handling of the complexities of Beane grows more sure as the novel goes on.
Date Submitted: August 30, 2019
Yeazel spins a yarn of grizzly but puzzling murders in the Minnesota woods.
While night fishing with his friend Carl Jerome, Alvin Beane, the chief of police of tiny Burden, Minnesota, investigates a troubling noise: “a shriek that pierced the night high and hard above the trees…weird but undeniably human.” They come upon an abandoned camp and a man’s corpse torn asunder, perhaps by a bear, though the county coroner says he looks like the victim of an “agricultural accident.” They soon discover the man was one of a trio of bank robbers wanted by the FBI. When feds show up, their main concern is that most of the stolen money is still missing. The next night, a drifter camping by the railroad tracks suffers the same gruesome fate as the bank robber. Beane has his own demons to contend with: a newly sober alcoholic, the bottle continues to call to him every step of the way, and the situation isn’t helped by the presence of Carl’s wife, Helen, with whom Beane had a brief but charged affair. Most of all, Beane needs to figure out what is terrorizing his community. Whatever is stalking the woods outside of town seems to be much larger than a bear. Yeazel’s gripping page-turner blends police procedural with lurid campfire tale. His prose has a brutal yet beautiful utility, simultaneously folksy and profound: “He had seen disturbing looks on the faces of the dead before but never one like this. This one had an eerie quality of simultaneously encompassing the unfathomable and something completely known—as if a properly trained person could read in it the identity of the killer by mapping the contours of the suffering it contained.” Simple yet wonderfully engaging, this book will sink its claws into readers.
An immersive, old-fashioned backwoods thriller.
DOWNERS GROVE – "An Unknown Shore," a book by Downers Grove author Jim Yeazel, was chosen for a feature review in the Jan. 15 issue of the publishing magazine "Kirkus Reviews."
Yeazel self-published the novel, a murder mystery set in the deep north woods of Minnesota.
The review calls the book “a gripping page-turner” and “wonderfully engaging,” a book that will “sink its claws into readers.”
The book is available through Amazon in both e-book and trade paperback.
PRINCETON — Princeton native Jim Yeazel’s self-published first novel, ”An Unknown Shore,” was selected for a featured review in the Jan. 15 edition of the prestigious publishing industry magazine Kirkus Reviews.
“It’s a great honor,” said Kirkus’s Anna M. Cooper, adding that fewer than one in 10 books are chosen by the magazine’s editors as Indie featured selections.
Kirkus Reviews is a widely followed publication in the industry, reaching more than 5,000 publishers, agents and librarians, said Cooper.
Set in the deep north woods of Minnesota, “An Unknown Shore” is both a psychological thriller and gripping murder mystery that builds to a heart-stopping climax.
“It’s a tale that pits the local police chief — a man wrestling with his own demons — against a very real and ancient terror he must confront to save himself and his town,” Yeazel said. “It’s a story I’ve been working on for several years, and I’m very gratified it’s been singled out by Kirkus.”
The Kirkus review calls An Unknown Shore” a gripping page-turner” and “wonderfully engaging,” a book that will “sink its claws into readers.”
His goal in writing the book was to draw readers in, and then surprise them with a few horrifying twists.
Yeazel is a 1972 graduate of Princeton High School who lives with his wife and daughter in Downers Grove. He has been working on his writing for years and has had a wide range of work experiences ranging from chauffeuring, the insurance field, grant writing and stay-at-home dad. All of it has been good experience for being a writer, he said.
An Unknown Shore is available through Amazon in both e-book and trade paperback formats.
PRINCETON — American author Henry Miller said every writer has to pay an apprenticeship of one million words. They must become one with the language by becoming one with their interpretation of it. A writer can still work even when they aren’t creating, and they can create with the reckless enthusiasm of a kid at Disney World. When an author writes, they must do so with the entire human race in mind, and they must do so with a single pen, fashioned solely for their grip.
Jim Yeazel has been interested in writing since he can remember, and he said it was the only thing he ever really wanted to do. His father played with some ink and paper, and always had books of every variety occupying the sills of his library, so Yeazel seemingly inherited his love for language before ever beginning his exploration of it.
Yeazel, a 1972 graduate of Princeton High School, grew up out in the country where he and his brothers invented every stage worthy of a proper production. Yeazel has always believed the imagination needs a set of sprinter’s cleats, that it may roam like a cheetah with visions of blistering speed across the open plains of creative engagement.
“It stimulates your humanness, this idea of exploring ourselves and who we are in the human drama,” Yeazel said, adding it’s not so much about finding the absolute answers, but exploring the questions that makes for a conscious contributor to the metrics of mankind. “As a person I never reach that end point completely, so what I think today might not be what I think tomorrow.”
Yeazel, who now lives in Downers Grove with his wife and daughter, said he was 12 or 13 when he knocked out his first story, about fishing at the canal, on the teeth of an old beat up typewriter. In his younger days, he didn’t think of lingual creation as a professional venture he could pursue, simply a task that was accomplished with ease. Words were fascinating to Yeazel, like a painter swiping every brush into an easel of color for the first time.
The task of a writer is not only telling a story, but telling it the way it’s meant to be told, Yeazel said, and good writing is emotional and psychological in that it takes place under the surface. Ernest Hemingway, with his simplistic expressions, was the first author that made an impression on Yeazel. Miller’s “stream of consciousness” was the opposite of Hemingway’s approach.
“When I read an author I really like I’m spending time with that person in his mind; I’m in his company,” Yeazel said. “I hope people have that sense when they read my work, that they know something about me.”
Yeazel recently published his first novel, “An Unknown Shore,” after a lengthy journey with the pen in his palm. He said the “whodunit, sounds in the night” murder mystery took him quite some time to write. The biggest mistake a rookie writer can make is aiming for the biggest deer in the forest with their first arrow.
“It took me a long time to get back to where I originally started,” Yeazel said, speaking of the journey that gained him great experience and insight, yet might not be the best way to write a book. “I could have made it a lot easier on myself if I had just followed my instincts.”
The soft-spoken and introspective Yeazel said his brother John came to him with an idea that eventually developed into “An Unknown Shore,” and there were many hidden gems within the words, so to speak, that Yeazel had never intended to dig up.
“It’s all about finding your own voice, for time isn’t unlimited, and I have many stories to tell,” said Yeazel, who considers it a great blessing to understand one’s potency at an early age. “It takes a sort of courage to be that person, and if it’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s to have that self-belief.”
Yeazel has given great effort to overcome inner barriers that at times discourage every person from hunting down the true and authentic mentality that rests in the core of their approach. Seeing the characters in his novel come to life, after countless revisions and rough drafts, and having pride in the sentences only he alone will ever write have been the greatest rewards of the overall composition.
“I hit a point of self-discovery, and it got easier. It had always been such hard work because I was fighting myself, but then I said wait a minute, I can do this, and it wasn’t work anymore,” Yeazel said, adding his wife advised him not to write a New York Times bestseller, but to write “An Unknown Shore.” “Embrace that love for writing and be thankful you’ve found something you can truly do. It’s all writing, and good writing never goes out of style.”
Yeazel said he hopes his readers can enjoy a good story, and after all these years of creation, he feels his words allow him to alleviate fear, negativity and ignorance in the world. Having always hidden his light under bushel to an extent, Yeazel relies on his humility to influence his surroundings.
“To beginning writers, I’d say ... write. Keep writing and get through those million words as fast as you can,” he said, motivating those drawn to the quill to not get discouraged and to write what their heart desires, as it’s all part of the apprenticeship. “Find your voice, and find a story worth telling.”
“An Unknown Shore” is available on Amazon in both eBook and trade paperback format.
