Overview
Stephen King, whose first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, the year before the last U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, is the first hugely popular writer of the TV generation. Images from that war — and the protests against it — had flooded America's living rooms for a decade. Hearts in Atlantis, King's newest fiction, is composed of five interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War.
In Part One, "Low Men in Yellow Coats," eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield discovers a world of predatory malice in his own neighborhood. He also discovers that adults are sometimes not rescuers but at the heart of the terror.
In the title story, a bunch of college kids get hooked on a card game, discover the possibility of protest...and confront their own collective heart of darkness, where laughter may be no more than the thinly disguised cry of the beast.
In "Blind Willie" and "Why We're in Vietnam," two men who grew up with Bobby in suburban Connecticut try to fill the emptiness of the post-Vietnam era in an America which sometimes seems as hollow — and as haunted — as their own lives.
And in "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling," this remarkable book's denouement, Bobby returns to his hometown where one final secret, the hope of redemption, and his heart's desire may await him.
Full of danger, full of suspense, most of all full of heart, Stephen King's new book will take some readers to a place they have never been...and others to a place they have never been able to completely leave.
In Hearts in Altantis, King mesmerizes readers with fiction deeply rooted in the Sixties, and explores -- through four defining decades -- the haunting legacy of the Vietmnam War.
Synopsis
By "Atlantis", Kang means the 1960s, that otherworldly decade which, like the fabled continent, has sunk into myth. Here, in five interconnected narratives that span from 1960 to 1999, King draws a stunning portrait of American life after the Vietnam War.
Billboard - Trudi Miller Rosenblum
This thoughtful, insightful book is riveting, with King's characters fully realized and fully believable.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewBentley Little has made his name as one of the newer masters of the horror tale, in both novel and short form (You missed The House? The Ignored? The Store? Catch up on 'em now!) He's written a superb and incisive review of Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis , originally published in Hellnotes: The Newsletter for the Horror Professional, and we just had to reprint it because we loved it so much.
Now, on to Bentley Little's take on Hearts in Atlantis...
Bentley Little says:
Thank God for Stephen King.
When Robert McCammon decided to prove to the world that he was a serious writer, he put out Boy's Life, an overrated amalgam of recycled Ray Bradbury, strained magic realism, and a rather lame mystery that was similar in tone (too similar, some thought) to the 1988 Frank LaLoggia film, Lady in White. A virtual renunciation of his horror past, the novel jettisoned his strengths and highlighted his weaknesses, making it hard to believe that the same author who had penned the brilliant and darkly literary Ushers's Passing had turned out this nice, tame, Mor coming-of-age story.
Stephen King has no such chip on his shoulder, no burning desire to disassociate himself from the field that made him famous. King realizes where his strengths are and also recognizes that there is nothing intrinsically demeaning about horror fiction, that it is in fact the most literary of genres.
He proves this without a doubt in the brilliant Hearts in Atlantis.
Consisting of two novellas and threeshortstories, all connected and all set between the years 1960 and 1999, Hearts in Atlantis concerns itself with the '60s, their fallout, and the lost boomer generation that they spawned. And while it's not possible to make a definitive statement about that complex and turbulent decade, King here comes pretty damn close.
The opening piece, "Low Men in Yellow Coats," is the book's best, a dizzying mix of fantasy, horror, and domestic drama that is, at its core, a heartfelt paean to the power of love. In it, 11-year-old Bobby Garfield develops a summer friendship with the mysterious old man who rents an apartment on the third floor of his building, and what he learns during the course of that summer forever sets him apart from his best friend, Sully John, his nascent girlfriend, Carol Gerber, and, indeed, the rest of the world. Extremely original and populated with the type of realistic, sympathetic characters that have become King's trademark, the story references both The Regulators and the Dark Tower books and ingeniously ascribes fantastic origins to mundane city sights, managing to make even sidewalk hopscotch squares threatening. A truly impressive achievement.
If "Low Men in Yellow Coats" is the standout, coming in a very close second is the title story, "Hearts in Atlantis." Narrated by a college student whose awakening social conscience coincides with the escalation of the Vietnam War and his exposure to the herd mentality of his fellow dorm buddies, "Hearts in Atlantis" is a piece of mainstream fiction that finds freshman Pete Riley at a crossroads in his life. Unable to resist the siren's call of an endless card game that has caused more than one student to flunk out and thus be eligible for the draft, Pete is also becoming aware that the thoughts, opinions, and worldview he once took for granted do not necessarily serve him in these changing times. Constancy is nowhere to be found, and even his conservative mother is touched by the vicissitudes of the age. Salvation is offered to Pete through Bobby's old girlfriend, Carol Gerber, who is a member of the burgeoning peace movement and with whom he becomes emotionally involved.
Along with the '60s, Carol is the thread that ties all of these stories together. Although she doesn't appear in the next piece, "Blind Willie," the chronicle of a suburban man with a haunted past and a double (or triple) life, she is at the crux of this tale, as she is in "Why We're in Vietnam," where Bobby's childhood friend, Sully John, looks back from the vantage point of 1999 at the war that forever changed him. The last and shortest story, "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling," brings everything full circle in a way that is both satisfying and unbearably sad.
The stories that make up Hearts in Atlantis are connected not only to each other but to the rest of the King canon as well. In this latest and strongest bid to become the Faulkner of the fantastique, King has managed to incorporate elements of earlier works into these pieces as part of an evolving overarching mythology. While some of his past efforts to weave the threads of disparate novels into a single tapestry sometimes seemed awkward and obvious, in 1997's Wizard and Glass and now in Hearts in Atlantis, he has found a way to smoothly integrate these elements that is not only consistent but seems natural and predetermined. There is also a strain of melancholy that links these two books, a sweet sadness that suffuses the narratives and reveals a writer at the top of his form.
A deft, assured work, Hearts in Atlantis addresses a generation's loss of innocence, and its observations about childhood and growing up make those found in King's earlier It seem clumsy and simplistic by comparison. Taken in toto, the stories here offer a powerful argument against groupthink and the madness of crowds, while reaffirming the importance of individuality, love, and friendship.
According to all of the publicity at the time, Bag of Bones was King's bid for legitimacy, his calling card to the reviewers who had previously dismissed his fiction out of hand because of its subject matter. Bag of Bones was a strong novel, but it did not have the depth or scope of Hearts in Atlantis This is the one that is going to wow the critics (or should, if there is any justice in the world). A book of heart, wit, intelligence, and moral reflection, it is one of Stephen King's very best.
—Bentley Little
>Bentley Little is the author of tons of short stories as well as the bestselling horror novels The House, The Ignored, The Store, and many others. He lives in southern California. This review was reprinted with permission from Hellnotes: The Newsletter for the Horror Professional.
Trudi Miller Rosenblum
This thoughtful, insightful book is riveting, with King's characters fully realized and fully believable.— Billboard
Newsweek
...[T]houghtful and scary tales...Library Journal
Whether you got the book for the holidays and you are finally catching up on your reading, or you meant to read it but didn't buy it yet--go for the unabridged audio version of King's 1999 blockbuster. King shares reading the five loosely interwoven stories with William Hurt. These vignettes are not typical King horror per se but the prose of a creative mind. Hurt's voice grasps the sf aspects of "Low Men in Yellow Coats" with distinction. In the first story, we meet 11-year-old Bobby Garfield during the summer of 1960, when he is befriended by an odd, strange, and single elderly man who employs Bobby to be his eyes and ears and ever watchful of peculiarly specific signs in the neighborhood. King relates the title story about some boys in a college dorm who are addicted to a card game, and the life lessons that they learn on campus over the year. The audio production includes musical interludes, which detract when intrusive but enhance when on the mark. Highly recommended, especially where King is in demand.--Kristin M. Jacobi, Eastern Connecticut State Univ., Willimantic Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\Entertainment Weekly
It's not just King's stories and their often indelible moments (girl at the prom, giant in the electric chair, maniac in a snowbound hotel) that explain his tight connection to readers. It's the man's uncanny talent for carefully rendering everyday life—from its relentless pop music and bowls of soggy breakfast cereal to its car dealerships and lost-pet signs—and then, to put it in his own words, infusing the mundane with "that breathless sense of the world as a thin veneer stretched over something else , something both brighter and darker." Sounds right, feels right, so we respond with gratitude.King's fine new book might illustrate that primary effect better than anything else he's written. A novel in five stories, with with players sometimes migrating from one story to the next, Hearts in Atlantis uses the 1960s as memory and metaphor to both decode and make mysterious American life in the '90s...
This is wonderful fiction by that guy we just like, a lot.
—September 17, 1999.
Dan Epstein
It’s hard to say which is the most appalling legacy of the American 1960s. Is it the constant recycling of Woodstock-era hit songs for car and shoe commercials? Or the notion that grooviness and enlightenment can be yours for the price of a tie-dyed T-shirt and a Janis Joplin record (or by extension, that of a yoga class and a feng shui manual)? Or the predictable way in which conservative politicians and pedagogues use the late-’60s counterculture as their scapegoat for all of our country’s problems?All of the above are odious, to be sure. But for my money, the decade’s most execrable consequence has to be the endless string of boomer-centric ’60s postmortems foisted upon us, both in print and on screen, during the past twenty years. Yes, the 1960s were unquestionably a turbulent and exciting time to be alive. But the need to act as if your generation was the first to actually recognize and protest against rampant injustices, the need to give oneself a metaphorical medal for having “been there,” the need to reassure your peers (and yourself) that it all “meant something”—these particular impulses, which continue to preoccupy authors and screenwriters born between World War II and the advent of the Beatles, have become even more tiresome than they are pervasive.
The latest luminary to get sidetracked by this sort of generational glad-handing is none other than Stephen King, the phenomenally successful author best-known for such modern horror classics as The Shining and Carrie. A college student during the hot-button period of 1966-70, King apparently feels that the time has come for him to say something about the magic and madness of the era, and has chosen Hearts in Atlantis as his vehicle for deliberation on the subject. Unfortunately, broad-reaching social commentary has never been King’s strong suit (limb-twisting suspense, colorfully drawn characters and nimble, accessible prose are really more his speed), and indeed, Hearts in Atlantis sheds no new light on this well-trod topic.
Composed of five interconnected narratives that take us from 1960 to the present day, Hearts in Atlantis touches on all the familiar themes: the draft, protest marches, peace signs, rock ’n’ roll, free love and the scars and disillusionment that afflicted both those who fought in ’Nam and those who fought the Man here at home. Only “Low Men In Yellow Coats,” the narrative that makes up the first half of the book, is entirely free of the ineptly placed pop-culture reference points (hey dude, the MC5’s Kick Out The Jams LP came out in 1969, not 1966) and heavy-handed revelations that mar the stories. Not coincidentally, it’s also the only part of Hearts in Atlantis that takes place before the hippie era.
The most frustrating thing about Hearts in Atlantis is that, if you can overlook the didactic baggage that weighs down the rest of the book, “Low Men” may be one of the finest things King has ever written. Set in a fictitious Connecticut town at the beginning of the ’60s, the story revolves around Bobby Garfield, a fatherless eleven-year-old who forms a deep friendship with Ted Brautigan, an older gentleman who’s just moved into the upstairs apartment. Though Ted is kind and extremely intelligent, there is something mysterious about him; Bobby’s mother, a pinched, unhappy woman who takes an instant dislike to most people, suspects that he might be a child molester, or at the very least a fugitive from the law.
In fact, Ted is running from “the low men,” alien creatures who need Ted’s superior mental powers to help them destroy a certain Dark Tower in their neck of the universe. In their attempt to remain undetected while on earth, the creatures have assumed the form of flashily attired thugs and outrageously accessorized automobiles. Ted senses that they are closing in and enlists Bobby’s aid in outwitting them; Bobby is torn between wanting to help his mentor escape and wanting him to stick around. As the tension builds to almost unbearable levels, a string of ominous events leads to a showdown with the low men and Bobby learns almost more than he can process about love, friendship and adulthood.
Unfortunately, King fails to quit while he’s ahead, and winds up diffusing the emotional resonance of his opening story by attempting to tie it into four subsequent narratives (ranging from the mildly amusing to the annoyingly implausible) about the legacy of the ’60s. King tries for a tidy ending by including a now-middle-aged Bobby in the final, present-day narrative, but it strikes a false chord; after all, part of the message of “Low Men” is that there are no tidy endings. If King had reined in his desire to make some sort of statement on his generation, Hearts in Atlantis (or at least “Low Men”) might well have been a classic. As it is, the book is a frustrating mixture of tangible magic and half-baked ideas. Not unlike the ’60s themselves.
Los Angeles Times
The true voice of a generation.Book Review The New York Times
Shows off King's traditional strengths: his empathy with chidren's chrushes and fears, his insight into the telepathic–seeming emotional hothouse of a small, isolated family and his ability to summon dread out of plain and familiar things.The Village Voice
The secret of King's success is not that he writes so well about monsters and ghosts, but that he writes so persuasively about us.Miami Herald
A sharp-eyed, sometimes heartbreaking rumination on the loss of innocence...Locus
One of the most impressive books of fiction published this year.Charles De Lint
Hearts in Atlantis is the Great American Baby Boomer novel. It focuses on the generation that came of age during the turbulent sixties, the days of hippiedom and the Vietnam War, exploring their roots as well as what became of them when the love beads and Purple Hearts were put away in boxes and the future arrived. There is a small fantastical element in the novel's connection to his Wasteland series that might prove a little perplexing to those unfamiliar with those books, but happily it doesn't play a major role and is soon swallowed by other, more pertinent matters...I'm being more than vague in what the novel's actually about, but that's because I don't want to steal away one iota of the pleasure you'll find as you delve into these pages. Let me just say that I'm pleased, and I have to admit, even a little surprised, that an author such as King with so many books already under his belt, can still surpass himself the way he has here.
So if you've passed on King's work because you don't read horror, do yourself a favor and give this book a try. It sings. It has heart. And it won't disappoint you for a moment.
—Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine