Most of the wealth in Dove Creek, West Virginia, is in the earth-in the coal seams that have provided generations with a way of life. Born and raised here, twenty-seven-year-old Cole Freeman has sidestepped work as a miner to become an aide in a nursing home. He's got a shock of bleached blond hair and a gentle touch well suited to the job. He's also a drug dealer, reselling the prescription drugs his older patients give him to a younger crowd looking for different kinds of escape.
In this economically depressed, shifting landscape, Cole is floundering. The mining corporation is angling to buy the Freeman family's property, and Cole's protests only feel like stalling. Although he has often dreamed of leaving, he has a sense of duty to this land, especially after the death of his grandfather. His grandfather is not the only loss: Cole's one close friend, Terry Rose, has also slipped away from him, first to marriage, then to drugs. While Cole alternately attempts romance with two troubled women, he spends most of his time with the elderly patients at the home, desperately trying to ignore the decay of everything and everyone around him. Only when a disaster befalls these mountains is Cole forced to confront his fears and, finally, take decisive action-if not to save his world, to at least save himself.
The Evening Hour marks the powerful debut of a writer who brings originality, nuance, and an incredible talent for character to an iconic American landscape in the throes of change.
“The Evening Hour, the bleak, absorbing debut novel from Carter Sickels, is about being stuck—in a job, in a town, in a way of life. Nearly every character is an underdog, and readers can’t help but root for them, even knowing all the while that it is futile . . . At a time when it’s easy for outsiders who are living comfortably to speak in terms of optimism and hope, The Evening Hour doesn’t shy away from the harsh truth that, for some, there simply isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel.”—Liz Raftery, The Boston Globe
“People often complain that ‘nothing happens’ in slow, internal, character pieces. It's also common to hear that plotty novels lack character development. Rare is the book that tries both. Rarer is one that succeeds. The Evening Hour, the debut novel by Carter Sickels, achieves that odd balance. It’s a story with lots of drama—violence, death, lost people returning, catastrophic destruction—told quietly and calmly. In fact, it feels expertly muted—like a deep, dull pain.”—Thomas Ross, The Portland Mercury
“The Evening Hour is engrossing. It elicits strong, complicated emotions from the first page. I felt inhabited by the characters, and as the page numbers increased, I was as scared for it to end as I was to see what would happen.”—Nick Reding, author of Methland
“A plainspoken novel, but one with intensely lyrical moments, about the devastation of the West Virginia landscape—and the devastation to the local communities—owing to mountaintop removal . . . Sickels has great insight into the emotional life of West Virginians, and he refreshingly presents them as fully realized characters rather than as clichés or stereotypes.”—Kirkus Review
Carter Sickels, a graduate of the MFA program at Pennsylvania State University, was awarded fellowships to Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. After living for a decade in New York City, Sickels left to earn a master's degree in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He now lives in Portland, Oregon.
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