The Evening Hour (review)

Ever since it was first identified as a region, Appalachia has always been thought of as being of the past. Ask a typical American about the images they associate with Appalachia, and it’s a fair bet they’ll say things like cabins, moonshine stills, and starving coal miners. They’d most likely imagine men dressed in overalls and carrying a shotgun, women in gingham dresses with babies on their hips, children playing with wooden toys—everyone barefooted. Most Americans get their ideas about the region from the movies, and most popular films set in the region—Coal Miner’s Daughter, October Sky, Matewan, Songcatcher, Cold Mountain—are set in the past. Even when films are trying to show contemporary Appalachia—movies like The Silence of the Lambs and Nell come to mind—the region is usually presented as a backwoods place that is behind in the times and inhabited by The Other.

While the literature of the region has certainly done a better job of preserving the dignity of the place and its people, the most widely read books about the region in the last couple of decades have almost always been set in the past. Think of Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies, Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven, or Ron Rash’s Serena, just to name a few. It is always a real pleasure when a novel is released about contemporary Appalachia, and even better when it is a truly good one. Books like Pamela Duncan’s Moon Women, Rash’s Saints At the River, and Ann Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been meet that test.

But no book has captured what Appalachia is like right now better than Carter Sickels’ moving and beautifully wrought novel, The Evening Hour. So up to the minute that it feels as if the novel is being written as you are reading it, the novel takes a long, hard look at the dark, wonderful heart of Appalachia and reveals it in all of its complex beauty, ugliness, joy, and sorrow. The Evening Hour manages to tackle pivotal Appalachian issues of the moment (drug addiction, mountaintop removal, leaving vs. staying, health care, economy, sexuality, religion…just to name a few) without ever coming off as a heavy-handed polemic.

The Evening Hour is the story of twenty-seven year-old Cole Freeman, an aide in a nursing home who takes very good care of his patients while also pilfering their valuables and their pills. He has a little drug business on the side, too, buying from folks who don’t need all their prescription supply (and those who do need the medication but need the money worse) and have come to trust him mostly through his affiliation with the nursing home. Cole is such a complex character that in one scene he cleans an old lady’s home before robbing her and somehow Sickels makes us understand and care deeply for him.

Cole lives in Dove Creek, West Virginia, a community that is being increasingly encroached upon by mountaintop removal. Cole has been raised by his grandparents after his mother runs off, and while they have both been good to him, he has been scarred by the fanatical Pentecostal religiosity of his sanctimonious grandfather. Cole’s childhood best friend has returned to the mountains after a brief flight to the city and comes back worse for the wear, eventually forming his own drug trade that is only one of the things that will pit the two against each other.

Meanwhile, the coal company is eyeing his widowed grandmother’s land, and Cole has taken up with a strong-willed environmentalist waitress. Despite his hesitation to fully embrace the company, Cole is much like most Appalachians: he believes that coal mining is just a part of life and there’s nothing to be done about it, so he might as well put up with it and go on. As the novel goes forward—and after a life-changing event that serves as the centerpiece...