The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels (A Review by William T. Langford IV)

Bloomsbury USA 

  $16.00/336 pgs

 

Carter Sickels fills his first novel with contradictions— religious devotion and the exploitation of the elderly—that the citizens of a fictionalized Dove Creek, West Virginia fail to hear or resolve. “God bless the pillheads,” chuckles Reese, the ex-convict compatriot of protagonist Cole Freeman. “Amen,” Cole intones. Along with the villainous Heritage Coal Company (that specializes in mountaintop removal mining), Sickels portrays a group of characters who mirror Heritage’s evils. The reader comes to see, via Sickels’ deft rendering of Cole’s conflicted conscience, the inability of a single man to impact his community’s fortune.

A host of supporting characters linger in a similar thematic purgatory. When twenty-seven-year old private care worker Cole Freeman ponders his nagging criminal habits (stealing valuables from the elderly, selling prescription drugs to junkies), he cannot differentiate himself from “who he’d become, or who he’d always been.” Terry Rose and Charlotte (Cole’s childhood best friend and on-and-off girlfriend, respectively) exist as specters, drifting in and out of focus and sobriety. An African-American octogenarian, Mabel Johnson, has an apparent third eye; Cole has the sneaking suspicion that Ms. Johnson portends his comings and goings, and that she alone sees through his innocent facade.

A richly grim setting that evokes a pre-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel bolsters the ethereal qualities of Sickels’ characters.

“Heritage had burned the trees and houses, leaving behind a mess of upturned earth and monstrous bulldozer tracks with pools of black, brackish water collecting in the ruts.”

The Evening Hour gives voice to a seldom represented, American population: that of our working poor, often subject to cyclical poverty, corporate exploitation and exposure to damaging drug culture. Most of the citizens of Dove Creek choose neither fight nor flight. Mostly, Cole says, “they just want to be”.

Cole’s worldview clouds with conflicting ideas. The modicum of stability he manages in this cragged, unforgiving landscape comes from his grandmother, a rare level-headed (and sober) figure in this work. Cole’s grandfather, Clyde Freeman, on the other hand, offers no such solace. Subjecting his grandson to years of scathing religious tutelage, this snake-handling preacher eventually pushes Cole to a breaking point. On one occasion, Cole refers to his personal guide to prescription painkillers as “the pill book, a drug dealer’s bible,” unaware of the dangerous implications of this association.

While Sickels establishes tense narrative arcs— Cole treats the elderly with kindness, but steals from them— too many narrative through lines make the book lag. For example, Cole’s strained relationship with childhood friend Terry Rose struggles to maintain tension in the novel’s last third; Sickels waits too long to offer the reader a key (and gripping) detail of their shared past. Characters develop too slowly, stuck in their archetypes—emotionally distant waitress, religiously obstinate grandfather— to keep the drama engrossing and believable to the novel’s conclusion. Unable to see the self-inflicted damages they perpetuate, the citizens of Dove Creek cannot escape the squalor and runoff. Sickels allows his characters neither retrospection nor introspection. Still, for its dedication to representing with care the lives of Americans often relegated to the margins and its richly defined setting, The Evening Hour, “this lingering between worlds, this wasting away” deepens our understanding of a community on the brink of destruction.

 

William T. Langford IV studies English at the Pennsylvania State University with a focus on African American Literature and poetry. His next adventure will take him to Kenya, where he’ll work with displaced youth as a coordinator of entrepreneurship and creative arts workshops. His work appears in Falling Hard, The TIME Online Blog, Work/6, twitter, and his website, willthepoet.com