The Evening Hour will be premiering at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Dramatic Competition!

Watch a teaser of the film here!

Lambda’s Debut Fiction Award Finalist

Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Debut Fiction Award Finalist

Finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award

Most of the wealth in Dove Creek, West Virginia, is in the mountains—in the coal seams that have provided generations with a way of life, but little prosperity. Born here and raised by his Pentecostal grandfather, twenty-seven-year-old Cole Freeman 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 pills of the older population to a younger crowd.

Cole’s work leads him down back roads and hollows, and into the homes of the town’s unique characters: an openly gay ex-con, an octogenarian environmentalist, and a myriad of old-timers, war veterans, shut-ins, and church-goers. As Heritage Coal razes the mountains, some choose to leave, a few fight, and most, like Cole, try to ignore the devastation. 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.

TESTIMONIALS

"Carter Sickels is a tremendous novelist with a tremendous story to tell . . ."
    -Stacey D'Erasmo, author of Wonderland

"This is one of the best American novels of the year, and it is a major contribution to Appalachian literature."         -Silas House, author of Southernmost

"The Evening Hour could be a hymn sung out in a country church; when I finished it, I wanted to close my eyes, listen to its echoes, feel the power of its song. . ."
    -Josh Weil, author of The New Valley

"In this stark, beautiful debut, Carter Sickels writes with gentle grace and cutting honesty about characters as wounded as the condemned land on which they live. . . "
-Aryn Kyle, author of Boys And Girls Like You And Me

"Absorbing… Nearly every character is an underdog, and readers can’t help but root for them, even knowing all the while that it is futile….Sickels manages to depict the region and its inhabitants vividly, but without condescension.”
   -The Boston Globe

"These characters—especially the women—and the obstacles in their way and their determination to overcome those obstacles will make the reader turn the pages all the way to an ending that is every bit as surprising as it is inevitable."
-The Brooklyn Rail

"How we heed our conscience in a changing world is one of the questions this book asks; where do we go to hear it when the places where it speaks to us are being destroyed? Sickels’ stunning debut novel offers an aching glimpse of how to listen." 
-The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"The setting is West Virginia and Heritage Coal has a monopoly: on the land, on the lives of the people who work for them, and on the families who live downhill from the toxic sludge pond. Life is hell and survival is all there is. Some have the Bible, some have booze and pills and sex, and some still dare to have a dream."
-Tom Spanbauer, author of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon