Jennifer Rouse Barbeau

Dying Hour Jennifer Rouse Barbeau

Finalist for the 2020 Whistler Independent Book Award for fiction!

Stan Templeman is a late night radio deejay. Timothy is the nine year old boy who calls in. They're just voices in the dark for each other. And yet maybe that's enough. . . ?

Stan Templeman has deemed the hour from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. to be the "Dying Hour" because he is certain he will die between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. in the morning, given how his chest tightens at that time of night. He challenges his listening audience to speculate about how they might die. Timothy is a nine-year-old who is awake at home and can't get back to sleep; he is listening to Stan's radio show on his laptop. Timothy uses his mother's cell phone to call in, to share the details of how he thinks he will die. In so doing, Timothy reveals details about his family situation that get other adult listeners riled up.

Over the course of several nights, Timothy and Stan chat on air, and other adult listeners chime in, speculating about the circumstances of Timothy's home life while underlining their own ills and those of society as they attempt to diagnose, and help, Timothy. And yet the person with the most to learn about himself (and his past) is Stan, who has nothing but his large and gravelly voice to keep him company through the wee hours of his late night radio show, in an empty sound studio that is filled with Stan's visions of his mother and father as Stan grew up.

Dying Hour immerses the reader in the darkest hours of night, where fate and desperation bring every radio show listener face to face with their own sharp and personal secrets. On a dark and lonely night, Stan--the Temple Man!--blurs the line between radio whisperings and sweet salvation.

The novella Dying Hour is part prose, part radio play, part theatrical script.