The Evening Hour

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The Evening Hour (eBook) Pub. Date: 1/23/2012 Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
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The Evening Hour Pub. Date: 1/17/2012 Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

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Overview
Editorial Reviews
Product Details
Meet the Author

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Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Set in modern-day West Virginia coal country, Sickels’s debut revolves around a cast of characters whose world is pulled out from under them. Though protagonist Cole Freeman—a 27-year-old who works as an aide at a nursing home—likes the people he assists, he steals their belongings and deals the prescription drugs he buys from them. From his point of view, he’s not doing anything wrong, simply helping his patients who need money to pay their bills. Meanwhile, a coal mining company engaged in mountaintop removal poisons the landscape in an effort to force people off their land, posing a deadly threat to residents. However, families like Cole’s don’t want to move. In the words of Cole’s dying grandfather, a fire and brimstone preacher and snake handler: “Why would I want to live on land that my people never walked on?” Cole meanders through life, making on-again, off-again friendships, but he vows to change direction as the drug trade turns violent and he faces suspicion. The question becomes: is there a better life out there? Even at his worst, Cole proves well-intentioned and likable, with deep caring for others that proves refreshing, particularly when disaster strikes. Despite moments of heavy-handed foreshadowing and repetitive conversations, the novel is grounded in rich storytelling. (Jan.)

Library Journal

In Dove Creek, WV, 27-year-old nursing home aide Cole Freeman cares for his elderly patients but helps himself to their valuables and prescription medications. His illicit earnings allow him to support the grandparents who raised him, a snake-handling pastor and a grandmother determined not to sell out to the mining company that looms above the hollows as it breaks down the mountains. The slew of junkie friends whom Cole supplies in the parking lot of the local bar and the visits he makes to those willing to sell their painkillers round out Cole's existence. The return of his long-absent mother and a high school friend complicates Cole's world even as he considers other options, like nursing school. Some heavy-handed foreshadowing clues us in to events to come that shake Cole's world. VERDICT Isolated and economically depressed, the Appalachia portrayed here is not new, but Cole's point of view is not one often encountered in contemporary fiction. First-time novelist Sickels paints Cole's experience with an unflinching hand. Give this to fans of regional literature and authors or display along with works by the likes of Sharyn McCrumb, Dorothy Allison, Barbara Kingsolver, Carolyn Chute, and Rick Bragg.—Jennifer B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll.-Northeast Lib., TX

More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

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. Cole Freeman is making it, but just barely. He works as an aide in a nursing home but supplements his meager income with the more lucrative trade of selling prescription drugs he either steals or buys off of the local elderly population. (In the small hollers of rural West Virginia, there's plenty of demand for escape.) Cole is to some extent a victim of his grandfather's Pentecostal religion, for this patriarch divides humanity into two types: the saved and the damned. Cole's mother, Ruby, was consigned to the latter category, as her father labeled her a slut for her unredeemable "whorish" ways. For 17 years she was absent from Cole's life but returns when Cole is 27. Cole has had an off-again/on-again relationship with the wild and tattooed Charlotte, but he's more interested in Lacy, a waitress at the Wigwam restaurant who lives an upright life and is morally committed to fight the depredations of the Heritage Coal Company, whose construction of a sludge dam threatens several of the communities along the creeks and streams. Cole's life is further complicated by the reappearance of Terry Rose, a childhood friend with whom he used to get drunk and stoned. Terry's idea of entrepreneurship is to cook meth, but this activity gets him both in trouble and in debt. Cole would like to change his life--to get out of the drug business, get a nursing degree and perhaps settle down with Lacy--but he feels tied down by circumstances that resist transformation. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781608195978
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Publication date: 1/17/2012
Pages: 336
Sales rank: 136,104
Product dimensions: 5.58 (w) x 8.52 (h) x 0.93 (d)

Meet the Author

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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Anonymous

Posted February 4, 2012

Great book

Hard to believe you can root for someone who steals from old people and sells pills to drug addicts, put Carter Sickels pulls it off. It's a quick read with good pacing and just the right amount of detail. The story never gets bogged down or slow. I can't wait for his next book.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted March 6, 2012

A powerful and imaginative story with an important message about

A powerful and imaginative story with an important message about how lives are impacted by greed (of the mining companies). Very readable. .
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Anonymous

Posted February 20, 2012

Well woven tale of modern day misery and truth! Must Read!

If you've ever been in the mountains, really deep in the mountains and if you have seen what they (mining companies) have done you know it isn't good. Listen as Carter introduces you to those living and dying through it!
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Anonymous

Posted February 10, 2012

Excellent novel

This story is not typical. It is well-told and extremely interesting with characters who resemble real people with all of their good and bad qualities. One questions what is "right" and "wrong" and "moral" and "immoral." Excellent!
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Posted April 26, 2012

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Posted February 22, 2012

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