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Fiction. Literature. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:The classic collection of five deeply resonant and disturbing interconnected stories from #1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King. Innocence, experience, truth, deceit, loss, and recovery are at the core of these five interconnected, sequential tales??each deeply rooted in the 1960s, and each scarred by the Vietnam War, which continues to cast its shadow over American lives, politics and culture. 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 and suspense, full of heart, this spellbinding fiction will take some readers to a place they have never been...and others to a place they have never been able to completely forget. Nearly twenty years after its first publication, Hearts in Atlantis is powerful and astonishingly current. "You will see Stephen King in a new light. Read this moving, heartfelt tragedy and weep??weep for our lost conscience." ??Bo… (more)
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The second one, "Hearts in Atlantis", is narrated by Pete. Currently a freshman at the University of Maine, Pete and his friends become addicted to playing Hearts and are risking flunking out, which at that time meant being drafted for Vietnam. In this story, Carol has moved from Connecticut and goes to the same University as Pete, but Carol has changed a lot since her adventures with Bobby and Sully-John.
In "Blind Willie", Willie Shearman is a Vietnam veteran who is doing penance for the biggest misdeeds he committed in his life, helping to beat Carol when he was a bully in his adolescence and the atrocities he committed in Vietnam.
"Why We're in Vietnam" details Sully-John's post-war experience when he attends a funeral of one of his fellow veterans. Even though a few years have gone by, Sully-John is still haunted by his experience in the Vietnam war, and especially by old mamasan, a Vietnamese woman that he has watched being brutally killed. Old mamasan visits him often and does so one last time as he's stuck in a traffic jam driving back from the funeral.
Finally, "Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling" is the closing story in which Bobby returns to Connecticut to pay his last respects to his childhood friend. He is looking for answers and perhaps for redemption, when he meets Carol once again and discovers the fate of his friends.
Hearts in Atlantis is not what King is usually famous for, i.e. horror and gory scenes but it reminds me more of Different Seasons by him, however I enjoyed this book much more. I started to like it from the very beginning and could not put it down until I finished it. My favorite story was definitely the first one, I loved the young Bobby and Ted and would have liked to see more of both characters in the other stories. The first novella also contains references to The Dark Tower series, which I have not yet read so far but after this book I am eager to find out more about it. The references to Vietnam are not always direct, but it gives you a lot to think about and more than once I had to stop and digest what I just read on how the Vietnam war divided the country and the repercussions that came after. King's style of writing in this book is as good as ever, he really cannot be beaten in that regard, every time I read a novel by him I remember why I like this author so much!
I knew that, eventually, I’d give Stephen King another try. I was very near mortally scarred by reading The Stand when I was 12 or 13. Look people,
Suffice it to say, I’m a wimp.
Anyway, this book didn’t look to scawwy. It seemed to fall into the Non-horror-Stephen-King category (of which I’ve seen several movies…).This is technically a collection of short stories, but it reads more like a novel. A few characters wind a common thread between the five stories.
We begin with Low Men in Yellow Coats: it is 1960. Three friends; Bobby, Carol, and Sully-John; live in a pretty little suburb in Connecticut. Bobby has a new upstairs neighbor, a strange older man named Ted. Against Bobby’s widowed mother’s wishes, he and Ted become friends. Bobby was recently gifted an adult library card, and Ted guides him through the world of adult fiction. Bobby’s mother constantly worries that Ted is abusing Bobby…there’s definitely a very King-esque creepy-old-man vibe coming from Ted. But the strangest thing that Ted does is warn Bobby about “Low Men in Yellow Coats”, and tells him to be on the lookout for strange things in his idyllic, suburban neighborhood: lost pet signs, upside down car-for-sale ads, things like that. This story is a great example of another common Stephen King theme: boys coming of age.
One thing happened that I feel I have to mention – Ted, at one point, mentioned “The Gunslinger.” ‘The Gunslinger!’ I thought. ‘Like, the Dark Tower Gunslinger?’ A few pages later, the Dark Tower is mentioned. I slammed down the book. I know OF The Dark Tower. I know it’s a lengthy series of novels, and I very VERY MUCH do NOT want to get involved in a series right now. I went to my handy catalog and only picked Hearts in Atlantis up again after I’d ascertained that it was not one of the Dark Tower series. In fact, those two little mentions were all that was said of it. Someday, when I have the time to get involved with a series, I hope to find out why King mentioned it in passing in this book.
Flash forward to 1966. Peter Riley’s a freshman at the University of Maine. He arrives on the first day with a Barry Goldwater bumper sticker on his car, and leaves at the end of the year with a hand-drawn peace sign on the back of his jacket. In between, he plays a helluva lot of Hearts and flirts with the pretty girl he works with in the cafeteria dishroom, Carol from Connecticut. I liked this story the best of them all because, well, I wasted away a large chunk of my college years playing euchre. I know of what Peter Riley speaks.
Blind Willie Speaks finally takes us out of the 1960’s. Willie is a seemingly normal businessman in 1983 – but he is haunted by two incidents in his life: the senseless beating of a girl when he was a bully growing up in Connecticut, and what happened when he wound up in Viet Nam. What he does to cope may seem outlandish to some, but whatever keeps him going, I guess. This, and the following two stories, is far shorter and more snapshot-like than the first two.
Why We’re in Viet Nam is probably the shortest story, but the one that haunted me the most. Sully-John meets with a fellow veteran at a third’s funeral, and they speak of things that they can only talk to each other about. In particular, of the My Lai massacre: the Hearts-obsessed soldier and Mama-san the old Vietnamese woman that he killed. This story is of a deeply troubled man and the ghosts of his past. I loved it.
Finally, we get to “Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling”. At first, I was kind of annoyed at this sort of neatly-tied-up ending to the book. It does give resolution to a couple of the folks in the stories.
So! Stephen King: I enjoyed it. At some point, I’ll try another one. I think I’d like to read another one of his books when I have the time to really get into it and read large chunks at a time. This book was read in bits and pieces – I felt like I couldn’t really get sucked in when I kept being interrupted by LIFE.
While he still churns out stories that delight us with the nastier things in life, every now and then King also publishes a book ("Different Seasons," "Dolores Claiborne," and "Bag of Bones") that proclaims, "Hey, put me up on the bookshelf next to Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald." Okay, maybe that's stretching it a bit, but I swear that sometimes I can see an Oprah Book Club gleam in King's eye.
Now, with "Hearts in Atlantis," he marches onto the literary battlefield holding high his "I'm a Serious Writer" banner. The result is a strange mix that sometimes hits, but mostly misses.
Labeled on the cover as "New Fiction," the book is comprised of a short novel, a novella and three short stories that center around the Vietnam War and its lasting imprint on American society.
The first piece, "Low Men in Yellow Coats," is the closest thing to horror you'll find between these covers. Set in 1960, it tells the story of eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield and his best friends Carol and Sully-John as they spend their idyllic youth in Harwich, Connecticut. One day, a mysterious lodger moves into the apartment upstairs from Bobby and his widowed mother. The new boarder warns Bobby to watch out for sinister men prowling the neighborhood in their fancy pimp-mobiles (the "low men" referred to in the title). Without giving away any of the story's surprises, let's just say that if you've read the Dark Tower series or "The Regulators," those Low Men will be awfully familiar.
The title story takes place in 1966 at the University of Maine where a group of students are obsessed with playing the card game Hearts. Outside their dormitory windows, of course, the Vietnam War protests are gathering steam. Things come to a head as some of the characters start to experience their own turmoil over loyalty versus betrayal. While it paints a fairly accurate picture of campus protests, this is probably the worst story of the whole lot. The characters are well-conceived, but there's not enough of a plot to carry them through to a satisfying conclusion.
"Blind Willie" and "Why We're in Vietnam" describe the lives of Vietnam veterans as they try to cope with the horrors they shared in combat. With the exception of "Low Men," the entire book centers around Vietnam, but never uses it as the direct setting. Instead, we get flashbacks in "Blind Willie" and "Why We're in Vietnam" to a My Lai incident which comes at us like a jump-cut movie, projecting lurid images in lightning flashes on our imaginations. You want monsters? King asks, I'll show you some real monsters--the kind that look just like you and me and occasionally go berserk. These two stories are the most unsettling and, consequently, the most powerful in the 522-page collection. Unfortunately, they're all too short. I found myself wanting to know more about these two characters.
The final short story, "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling," is a grace note to the rest of "Hearts," tying the interconnected characters and stories of the previous pages into a final, sweet epiphany as Bobby returns to Harwich to confront the ghosts of his past.
"Hearts in Atlantis" got better as it went along, each story building on the others and finally bringing the reader full circle to Bobby's story from "Low Men." Nonetheless, I was vaguely unsatisfied by this effort from Stephen King. He seemed to be trying too hard to shake the horror mantle. Certainly, he's got a way with words and these characters are some of the best developed in any of his books; but I think he overreached himself here. The plot is just not very engaging--it's like a symphony that builds and builds, then ends with a little tweet from a piccolo. I kept asking myself, if anyone else's name but Stephen King's was on the cover of this book, would it have rated very high on my scale of interest? Unfortunately, no.
Here, King cleverly exposes the prejudices of 1950s and '60s America without too much reliance on his trademark horror devices.
All his books are worth reading, I think this is one of his best in a quiet way.
Somewhere into the book, I got the feeling that I was missing out on the "aside" -sensing that there was an emotional sweet spot which the Author had zeroed on, but I had on too thick a skin to feel it.
I
There was , after all, a movie made with Anthony Hopkins in the lead.But I'd be interested in seeing how many people outside North America root for this.
I give it three stars, not very common in my library.
But I guess a lot of people really liked the book.
Hearts in Atlantis is not a horror book at all. It's been out a while, and picked it up for cheap used, and didn't know this about it. It follows the life of an uninteresting kid from the Northeast leading
Other King books have started out slow but managed to generate SOME interest by the end. This never did. I kept waiting for a justification that I did not waste 19 hours of my life listening to this, but it never came.
I like Blind Willie best, although I doubt if any of the characters will linger in my mind as much as those from other King novels.