Missouri Folklore Society | November 4th, 2023

Looking forward to being part of this panel at the Missouri Folklore Society where I will be talking about my novel The Black Harvest, which deals with irregular guerrilla forces during the Civil War and Reconstruction period.

Ashby Marchbanks AKA "Preacher" falls in with William Clarke Quantrill's deadly bushwhackers who fight battles on their own terms without the sanction of Jefferson Davis and the impromptu Confederate government. Preacher becomes well acquainted with like-minded young rebels like Frank James and his seemingly charmed younger brother Jesse. They fight with many others who would become notorious in their own right under another violent young chieftain, Captain Bloody Bill Anderson, in the waning days of America's war. This is all out war in the western theater where the outnumbered guerrillas wear stolen Federal blue and fight by "bushwhacking" their enemies in a war fought at close range, bristling with Navy Colts. Theirs is a war for survival on the bloody border where violence had been going on long before Fort Sumter.

Praise for The Black Harvest

"It may seem a bit odd to call a novel set in the nineteenth century timely, but the partisan warfare at the heart of Daren Dean's The Black Harvest has never really gone away. It's happening all around the world right now and right now, in the fall of 2020, we have even seen a few preliminary skirmishes here in the United States. Dean's closely researched account of guerilla fighting in Civil War era Kansas and Missouri shows just how very, very bad it can get. With the antic verve of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and the Old Testament rigor of Andrew Lytle's The Long Night, this novel represents historical fiction at its very best."

—Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Soul's Rising, Ten Indians, Devil's Dream, and many others

"The Black Harvest injects you into the heart of America's bloody and still-bleeding past. Daren Dean has written a masterful historical novel. There has never been a better time to read it."

-Aaron Gwyn, author of All God's Children, Wynne's War, and Dog on the Cross

"Set in the brutal guerilla fighting of Quantrill's Missouri, Black Harvest will take you back there. It won't be pretty, but it will be eloquently put. The Preacher, the main character, has a bittersweet conflict going on inside, between bloodshed and his deep faith. It will take the end of the war and then some for him to come to terms with this. I was taken by how Dean so easily removes the legends--Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson, Frank James, Cole Younger--from myth and turns them human in a hard time."

-Tom Abrams, author of Yonder Where the Road Bends

"Dean’s writing also offers a striking brew of poetry and punch, combining unflinching realism with delicately woven imagery. Although the portrayal of the war is as historically rigorous as it is dramatically affecting, the real core of the novel is Ashby’s inner conflict as he tries to salvage some vestige of his humanity during this “time of violence.” A remarkable tale of war and its ghastly ramifications."

-Kirkus Reviews