Hearts in Atlantis - Hardcover

King, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684853515 ISBN 13: 9780684853512

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1999

Synopsis

Five interconnected, sequential tales set in the years between 1960 and 1999 center around the Vietnam War and weave together innocence, experience, truth, deceit, loss, and recovery.

About this title

Review:

Stephen King's collection of five stories about '60s kids reads like a novel. The best is "Low Men in Yellow Coats," about Bobby Garfield of Harwich, Connecticut, who craves a Schwinn for his 11th birthday. But his widowed mum is impoverished and so bitter that she barely loves him. King is as good as Spielberg or Steven Millhauser at depicting an enchanted kid's-eye view of the world, and his Harwich is realistically luminous to the tiniest detail: kids bashing caps with a smoke-blackened rock; a car grille "like the sneery mouth of a chrome catfish"; a Wild Mouse carnival ride that makes kids "simultaneously sure they were going to live forever and die immediately."

Bobby's mum takes in a lodger, Ted Brautigan, who turns the boy on to great books such as Lord of the Flies. Unfortunately, Ted is being hunted by yellow-jacketed men--monsters from King's Dark Tower novels who take over the shady part of town. They close in on Ted and Bobby, just as a gang of older kids menace Bobby and his girlfriend, Carol. This pointedly echoes the theme of Lord of the Flies (the one book King says he wishes he'd written): war is the human condition. Ted's mind-reading powers rub off a bit on Bobby, granting nightmare glimpses of his mum's assault by her rich, vile, jaunty boss. King packs plenty into 250 pages, using the same trick Bobby discerns in the film Village of the Damned: "The people seemed like real people, which made the make-believe parts scarier."

Vietnam is the otherworldly horror that haunts the remaining four stories. In the title tale, set in 1966, University of Maine college kids play the card game Hearts so obsessively they risk flunking out and getting drafted. The kids discover sex, rock and politics, become war heroes and victims, and spend the '80s and '90s shell-shocked by change. The characters and stories are criss-crossed with connections that sometimes click and sometimes clunk. The most intense Hearts player, Ronnie Malenfant ("evil infant"), perpetrates a My Lai-like atrocity; a nice Harwich girl becomes a radical bomber. King's metaphor for lost '60s innocence is inspired by Donovan's "sweet and stupid" song about the sunken continent, and his stories hail the vanished Atlantis of his youth with deep sweetness and melancholy intelligence. --Tim Appelo

Review:

Astonishingly good...honourable, deeply felt and almost wonderful (Independent)

A writer of excellence...King is one of the most fertile story-tellers of the modern novel...brilliantly done (Marcel Berlins, The Sunday Times)

One of the most impressive books of fiction published this year (Locus)

Page after page, a truly mature King does everything right and deserves some kind of literary rosette. His masterpiece (Kirkus Reviews)

King just gets better! (Cosmopolitan)

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0684853515
• ISBN 13: 9780684853512
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 512